WATER AS A CRITICAL OPERATOR: DÁVALOS AT THE MUSEO DE ARTE MODERNO OF SANTO DOMINGO

On February 19, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo will open All the Manifestations of Water, a major solo exhibition by Dominican artist, writer, and cultural producer Mario Dávalos. This exhibition represents the peak of more than twenty years of sustained artistic inquiry into the philosophical, political, and sensorial registers of the relationship between humans and their environments.

Across painting, photography, writing, and archival practice, Dávalos has developed a discursive body of work that reframes water not as pictorial motif but as a methodological and epistemic vector through which to apprehend broader questions of embodiment, temporality, and cultural mediation.

Structured as a conceptual cartography, the exhibition challenges inherited notions of landscape as a static surface of representation. Instead, it proposes a vision of landscape as a relational event—one that is continually shaped by movement, perception, memory, and social imaginaries. Within this framework, water emerges as both a material phenomenon and a critical operator: it functions as a locus of ontological inquiry, a metaphor for the fluidity of identity and experience, and a force that articulates the intricate entanglements between ecological processes and human systems of meaning.

In Dávalos’s interwoven practice, water destabilizes traditional visual hierarchies, foregrounding processes of flow, reflection, stasis, and origin as elements that exceed mere representation. By doing so, the exhibition invites audiences to recalibrate their perceptual and conceptual orientations toward nature, foregrounding water’s capacity to reveal the contingent, mediated conditions through which landscapes—and by extension, selves—are constituted.

Curated by Sara Hermann Morera, with museography design by Orlando Isaac and overall coordination by Heliconia Projects (Nicole Bainov and Elsa Maldonado), the exhibition articulates a critical and expansive reading of Dávalos’s interdisciplinary practice, which spans painting, photography, writing, and archival experimentation.

Mario Dávalos (b. Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) is a multidisciplinar artist whose practice operates at the intersection of image, text and ecological inquiry. His work critically examines the cultural construction of landscape and the representational regimes through which nature is mediated, historicized and aestheticized in contemporary life. Dávalos’s artistic formation, grounded in studies at the Altos de Chavón School of Design and Parsons School of Design (The New School, New York), provided an early framework for his sustained interrogation of form, perception and environment.

All the Manifestations of Water, is not a conventional retrospective but as a cartographic itinerary of questions—a dynamic system of relations that brings into focus the elemental, the speculative and the affective.