Davide Balula: Broken Things Float Faster

François Ghebaly is pleased to present Broken Things Float Faster, New York-based artist Davide Balula’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. 

Balula has created new works on-site that prioritize shade, wind, and water, with formal sculptures serving as vehicles for abstruse effects. A wood plank suspends from rafted ceilings by twine, treated with water-resistant coating, holding pools of water on its surface. The water is only distinguishable as a live, moving element when the plank stirs in the draft of an open door or passerby. Four elements – wood, twine, water, and gravity – produce a captivating effect that highlights water in its purest form. 

A series of abstracted vents and awnings line the adjacent gallery. The vents, minimal structures with texture and palette borrowed from Southern Californian architecture, each boast a unique internal logic. Outfitted with custom fans, air is drawn into channels and exhaled through precisely routed facades, produced from digital traces of the artist’s hand. The vents – perplexing in their form and arbitrariness – implicate viewers in their streams of air.  

Balula’s abstracted takes on metropolitan storefront awnings are uncanny in their simplicity. Hanging low, their unusual scale calls into question our collective architectural memory, but Balula’s interest lies foremost in the darkened stages the awnings create. Subtle colored spotlights on the awnings amplify the shade beneath them, rendering the “true white” of the wall the opposite color of the spotlight.  

In conjunction with Broken Things Float Faster, Balula has restaged Interrupting Words with Burp Sounds, a performance in which brass and wind musicians play a reactional score of belches prompted by the consumption of drinks and infusions unique to each instrument, including garlic and vinegar concoctions.   

Davide Balula (b. 1978, Portugal) lives and works between New York, NY and Paris, France. Recent solo exhibitions include Gagosian Gallery, Athens; galerie frank elbaz, Paris; Galerie Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels. Other exhibitions include Musee d’Art Moderne, Troyes; Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne; Maison Particulière, Brussels; The Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, Riga; Fondazione Carriero, Milan; Palazzo Cavour, Torino; Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; WIELS centre d’art contemporain, Brussels; Centre Pompidou, Paris. Balula has staged performances with Art Basel Unlimited (2016) and Parcours (2015), Basel; Public Art Fund, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Biennale de Belleville, Paris; Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Performa 2009, New York; among others. His work has been placed in major institutional collections including Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris.