Statement Profile GlogauAIR Project CV Summary

Statement

My work approaches water as psychic matter, following Bachelard’s idea of the element as imagination, memory, and inner life. I engage landscape painting as a historical tradition, while shifting its focus toward the simulation of nature as a contemporary substitute for nature itself. These paintings do not describe the wild, but its domination: environments engineered, contained, and aestheticized. By painting constructed landscapes, I question how control, comfort, and progress have replaced intimacy with the elemental, revealing the quiet violence embedded in our images of paradise.

Profile

GlogauAIR Project

Forgotten Spirits is a painting project that approaches water and land as sacred forces displaced by contemporary logics of consumption. It explores landscape as a civilizational construct, where spirituality has been replaced by comfort, spectacle, and control. Through unstable, hybrid terrains that balance figuration and abstraction, the work examines how nature is simulated, optimized, and consumed, revealing the erosion of reverence and the quiet domination embedded in contemporary images of paradise.

CV Summary

Mario Dávalos

Painter · Photographer · Writer · Cultural Entrepreneur
Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

Mario Dávalos is a Dominican multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the relationship between nature and civilization, landscape as cultural construction, and the simulation of the natural as a contemporary experience. He works across painting, photography, and writing.

He studied Fine Arts and Illustration at CHAVÓN and holds a BFA from Parsons School of Design (The New School, New York). His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows across the Caribbean, the United States, and Europe, and presented at international art fairs including Contemporary Istanbul, Art Hamptons, and Hotel Warszawa Art Fair. From 2003–2005, he was a member of Colectivo Shampoo, a seminal platform for contemporary artistic experimentation in the Dominican Republic.

As a writer, he has published fiction, essays, and travel narratives, including Wildscapes, Africa; Notes of a Traveler, I am there / I am not there, and Yugen: Seven Journeys through Alaska, as well as two short story collections. His work appears in multiple literary anthologies published in Latin America and Spain.

Parallel to his artistic practice, he has developed a long career as a cultural producer and entrepreneur, co-founding creative companies and producing documentary and editorial projects focused on nature, territory, and identity. He holds a Master’s degree in Political Communication and Strategic Governance from The George Washington University.