InCadaqués 2026: Jack Davison

Jack Davison: Casino de Cadaques

For InCadaqués 2026, Cob Gallery presents a solo exhibition by British photographer Jack Davison at the Casino de Cadaqués, bringing together colour pigment prints and photopolymer gravures alongside a screening of his short film A is for Ant. This will be the first time all three mediums are brought together, to reflect the gamut of Davison’s practice.

Davison’s practice has long shared an affinity with the visual language of Surrealism, not least through its sense of play and experimentation. Bodies fragment, shadows assume lives of their own and familiar objects are transformed through cropping, distortion and unexpected association. Many of these visual tricks are created in-camera rather than through post-production: Davison photographs through glass and water, plays with reflection, refraction, shadow and perspective, and uses simple physical interventions to distort what sits before the lens. The resulting images ask the eye to look twice, occupying a space between observation and invention and finding moments of strangeness, humour and illusion within the everyday.

Seen in Cadaqués, these images enter into an especially resonant dialogue with Salvador Dalí. Certain motifs offer almost accidental echoes of Dalí’s world: elongated animal limbs recall the impossible, attenuated legs of his elephants, while elsewhere bodies are disassembled, obscured or transformed through shifts in scale and perspective. Rather than direct quotation, these correspondences reveal a shared fascination with visual illusion and with destabilising what we think we recognise.

This slippage between the familiar and the uncanny continues in A is for Ant, made in collaboration with Shona Heath. Structured around the alphabet, the film sets Davison’s photographic language into motion as a playful procession of bodies, characters and objects in continual transformation.

Moving between the saturated materiality of the colour prints and the deep blacks and tonal delicacy of gravure as well as the playfulness of collage, costuming and animation in his moving image - the exhibition brings together different strands of Davison’s image-making to reveal a world in which the everyday is never entirely as it appears.

Jack Davison: Casa Dali - Portlligat

Drawn from Jack Davison’s extensive black-and-white archive, this constellation of images takes on a new physical form within the olive grove of Salvador Dalí’s home at Portlligat. For the first time in Davison’s practice, the photographs have been realised as pigment prints on polished aluminium, transforming images traditionally encountered on paper into reflective, sculptural objects dispersed through the landscape.

Figures, faces and bodily fragments appear and disappear amongst the olive trees: elongated silhouettes echo branches and trunks; bodies dissolve into shadow; familiar forms become strange. Throughout Davison’s work, the everyday is continually subject to transformation. Through framing, reflection, distortion and in-camera experimentation, the photograph becomes a place in which reality can briefly slip into something more dreamlike. Seen here, these images find a natural dialogue with the Surrealist legacy of Portlligat.

The works retain a connection to Davison’s established treatment of his black-and-white archive, which he hand-prints as photopolymer gravures. Here, the polished aluminium recalls the material presence of an inked gravure plate: blacks appear deep and matte, while highlights and fragments of detail flicker across the polished surface. As the light changes, the image moves between opacity and reflection, allowing the sky, the landscape and the photograph to momentarily occupy the same plane.

The polished surfaces bring another image into play: the landscape itself. Mediterranean light, passing clouds, the blue of the sky and the movement of the surrounding trees are caught fleetingly across the aluminium, similarly each photograph changes with its environment and with the position of its viewer.

There is also an intimacy connecting the two artists’ worlds. Just as Gala was a constant presence within Dalí’s life and imagination, Davison’s practice has long been shaped by those closest to him: recurring faces and bodies becoming collaborators, subjects and muses through whom images are continually reinvented. Rather than portraiture in a conventional sense, intimacy becomes another means of transformation.

This presentation marks the beginning of Davison’s dialogue with Casa Dali and Portlligat. Appointed as photographer in residence for the 10 year anniversary of InCadaques festival- he will return to spend time within Dalí’s house and its surrounding landscape, creating a new body of site-specific photographs as the culmination of the project, moving from an archive transformed by this place towards new images made from within it.