Isaac Vazquez Avila, Letting Go, pt.2 Gallery, Oakland, CA

Isaac Vazquez Avila, Installation at pt. 2 Gallery

By Matt Gonzalez

Isaac Vazquez Avila's newest exhibition at pt.2 Gallery in Oakland is a deliberate departure from his three previous shows with the gallery; gone are the references to sign painting and explicit Latinx iconography he is known for utilizing. In their place, Vazquez Avila embarks on an intensive effort to get to the core of what inspires a painting. Rather than design what the composition will look like, Vazquez Avila now obliterates every gesture and impulse that leans toward recognizable elements. Divesting of these once assumed ingredients in his painting, surprisingly, doesn't eviscerate the artist Vazquez has been, but rather affirms that someone's essence can be understood through a process of stripping away expectations. Said another way, the values an artist seeks to share can foment meaning if its root source is activated, whether consciously or not, regardless of whether specific iconography is depicted. The resulting manifestation of self is both deeply personal and a disregard for the answers a viewer typically seeks when they attend an art exhibition.

Isaac Vazquez Avila
Aa.
Oil pastel, acrylic, gouache on canvas.
24.5 x 33.5 inches
Artist made frame
2025

If Vazquez Avila's learned habitudes find him painting figuratively, he proceeds to eliminate those elements from the canvas. He simply paints over them. He seeks first and foremost to let go of planning and loses interest if the recognizable forms become precious. He realizes these components may be an anchor keeping his boat in place, for which he is grateful, but they're also limiting; thus, he wants to constantly free himself of the constraints they impose. To do otherwise is to already know what the painting will be; and this is no longer of interest to him. By repudiating these impetuses, he seeks to activate creative impulses that push him toward the essence of being. Sometimes this is accomplished by placing shapes and color into the composition without apparent thought. At other times, he might simply let his painting hand move around and see what results, not as an action painter in the New York School vein, but rather something closer to what the Surrealist sought in automatic writing. This activity isn't random because he's activating something in his core, something that he doesn't know explicitly, yet is aware lies deep within himself. Vazquez Avila wants the unconscious, something composed of the not-cognizant parts of ourselves, to speak through his movement, thus hoping to reach an authenticity about who he is and what he represents, something more genuine than any imagery could achieve. While Vazquez Avila didn't start with realism and figuration as a painter, he always seemed somewhere in the middle of recognizable forms and something opaque and mysterious. This exhibition clearly marks a shift toward a more liberated sense of craft and meaning, a decidedly firm step toward inscrutability. 

At the center of his process, Vazquez Avila tries not to set out to do anything, meaning he doesn't try to pursue representational imagery or a particular type of abstraction. He's literally letting go of intentionality and any perceived stratagem. Although one might expect, as a result, to get a painting that is strictly mark making, or haphazard application of paint on some substrate, Vazquez Avila manages to render beautiful and elaborate compositions as he surrenders to fundamentally held ideals of color, shapes, texture, and composition. In other words, his painting complexity isn't diminished by a process reverting to primitive impulses, though that would likely be the case for someone not steeped in a life of aesthetic engagements. One senses, looking at these artworks, that Vazquez Avila was painting even before he was a painter. His unanchored process results in a visual scape of some kind, without identity or prefix (i.e., seascape, cityscape, landscape, etc). The paintings seem to offer the viewer a place, one vaguely approximating representation.

B., Oil pastel, acrylic, gouache on canvas , 15.5 x 13.5 inches, Artist made frame, 2025 (above)

Isaac Vazquez Avila
D.
Oil pastel, acrylic, gouache on canvas
16 x 20 inches
2025

Vazquez Avila works on many paintings and sculptures at once. This lends a cohesive quality to the finished work, since, in actuality, each piece comprises roughly the same historic moment of creation and execution. There is a back and forth of emphasis and influence as he builds the surfaces up, and assembles his components together. Certain colors can be seen making cameos throughout the work, as if in some instances, Vazquez Avila didn't want to waste paint left on his brush. Even this innate resourcefulness becomes a lever of unconscious adherence to purpose. Seeing the work together, one can imagine Vazquez Avila walking amidst the pieces, hovering, as he decides what exactly needs augmentation. As if watering a garden or window shopping, Vazquez Avila's eye wanders around intuitively, guiding his next inventive choice, all the while fusing the work into a whole.

Rather than thinking the sculptural object is static, Vazquez Avila believes it invites a fluidity whereby change isn't an offense but constantly sought. This is true in regards to his own life, where he's found ways to adjust to his surroundings and new cognition. Awareness and understanding of the three-dimensional form is only a starting place for reimagining a new configuration. Context is part of it, but the manner in which the object is presented and regaled recasts it. There is a symbiosis that invites manipulation or shaping; dressing may be a better descriptor. It is a process of accrual in service of an aesthetic understanding the object cannot relate to alone, because it is laden with societal customs, history, and anticipation. Even the act of pushing away the expected can be a process of newfound calculation leading to supposition.

Isaac Vazquez Avila
K.
Mixed media on found wood
12 x 11 x 3 inches
2025

Vazquez Avila has placed the sculptures on a concrete platform, made from a series of cinder blocks he's stained to look like volcanic rock, thus referencing Mexican landscape and architecture. Vazquez Avila was born in Mexico City and emigrated to the U.S. at the age of five. This raises an important question of how that early, largely forgotten period impacts the work, particularly when the artist is mining subconscious influences. Like most of us, Vazquez Avila does remember certain things about his childhood: the 1985 earthquake, accompanying his father to bullfights, going to a local arcade, and running around his Grandmother's home, for instance. Thus, for Vazquez Avila the formation of visual shapes, smells, speech, and bodily movements all originate in Mexico. There is a primitive, visceral quality to these formative effects. Vazquez Avila can smell Mexico and knows the wood and concrete of its architecture. 

Isaac Vazquez Avila
R.
Oil pastel, acrylic, gouache on canvas
10 x 8 inches
2025

It is not uncommon that artists want to find a way to express subconscious thoughts and feelings. But delving into what is left when intentionality is repudiated is complicated. Certainly, the knowledge or impressions of shapes and color must factor into what an artist may be activating. The core earthiness that comes through a place like Mexico; the sun, weight, smell, energy of it all; its influence is innate, atmospheric, basically primal. Vazquez Avila may, in fact, be better able to reach these signifiers by attempting not to be consciously induced by anything at all. As many artists from a specific ethnic background can attest, there is often a weight of responsibility to display symbols and meaning that expressly represent their country of origin. Vazquez Avila doesn't feel he has to do that, and yet, those influences are present even as he works in a manner you would expect would eliminate those explicit characteristics about himself. All of this is complicated by the acknowledgment that Mexico City is an international city, with both indigenous and European influences. Geographic places may not exactly operate like our body organs, whereby we experience functionality seemingly unaware of their source, but we do absorb the geography of a place and its corresponding colors and vibrancy. Vazquez Avila's palette itself is both a choice and likely evolves from preferences he experienced during his childhood and through his subsequent travels in Mexico as an adult. The reinforcement of acquired aesthetics mixed with the tendency to gravitate toward things we relish all become the caldron of unconscious influence visible in the finished oeuvre.

Isaac Vazquez Avila
J.
Mixed media on found wood
14 x 7 x 5 inches
2025

Vazquez Avila gathers wood objects he finds and fluctuates using them just as they are or by manipulating them by carving into them.  He chisels and sands, utilizes axes and hammers, but ultimately wants the objects to look like the unembellished pieces he's found. In this way, they live seamlessly together. Aware that people tend to value the familiar less, Vazquez Avila knows that when exalted as assembled sculpture, they become three-dimensional things worthy of our gaze. Regardless, one has the impression these objects effortlessly coalesced. The sculptures transform depending on their orientation and the sequence of placement in their architectural platform. There are a myriad of references suggested; crescent shapes give the viewer an impression of the moon or perhaps a carved cantaloupe, although the representation suggested remains just that. The sculptures are composed of hard elements, assembled primarily from wood, yet they invite being handled and embraced. They purposely lack symmetry in the sense of geometric uniformity, helping to convey being animate. In archeology, enigmatic objects from the ancient world are often found, whose use in antiquity are unknown, such as Neolithic stone balls or chalk drums. They are often uniquely curved or hard-edged forms. Vazquez Avila's work seems to be a wild collection of these kinds of things, where combined appendages form new possibilities. The viewer will be drawn to speculate on their origin or illusory functionality.

Isaac Vazquez Avila
A.
Oil pastel, acrylic, gouache on canvas.
26 x 25.5 inches
Artist made frame
2025

In a painting titled "A.", Vazquez Avila relies on his sundry assortment of materials, including acrylic paint, oil stick, gouache, china marker (or wax pencil), both soft pastel and oil pastel, plaster, light molding paste, and graphite. Additionally, he uses various paint mediums affecting consistency, drying time, and finish, including a water-based heavy body gel, which dries transparent. The soft pastel creates a chalk-like texture with vibrant blended colors, while the oil pastel has a wax finish and is amenable to blending and layering. Vazquez Avila achieves depth and perspective as he combines various media on the wood surface, assuring the parts aren't competing on the same plane. Specifically, the yellow color in the composition consists of soft pastel. The dark element in the upper right portion of the painting is made up of gouache and oil stick, although in some places he's mixed the color with a transparent light molding paste and thereafter applied it with a hard brush, causing it to bleed into the wood board. This causes it to flatten any paint ridges, thereby eliminating any sense of overwroughtness. There is a chalkiness that abounds, making it analogous to a fresco surface. This, combined with the layering of pigment, creates a dynamic picture plane which isn't flat; there is a conspicuous back and forth as the eye permeates. The equilibrium, including color balance, enhances the composition and keeps it from being entrenched.

A., Oil pastel, acrylic, gouache on canvas, details

Despite Vazquez Avila's efforts to the contrary, "A." contains elements that seem recognizable. Viewers should reflect that this is simply the human mind seeking something familiar, which it invariably does, whether it be a face, a house with windows, or even an elephant's head in profile. He combats this natural tendency by rendering an undeniable blurriness which both satisfies the primal color impetus and mostly obliterates known forms. He's expressly telling the viewer to surrender expectations. The brush work is, at times, reminiscent of Pierre Bonnard, who also rendered a chalkiness in his application of pigment. Both painters attain a faintness and buzzing quality to their surface, evoking the impression that sections of the painting have been rubbed into the panel support. Rather than see the completed works as a victory or even finished, the exhibition conveys an expression of time, place, and movement in a composition that is really an excerpt of a larger practice. In "A.", this is augmented by a simple white frame offsetting the picture; the width in the horizontal portion of the frame is wider than the vertical, creating an entrance from which to look through at the painting. Vazquez Avila gives the frame an object quality and reminds the viewer that everything they are looking at is tamed or confined to an enclosure, yet could have easily extended beyond the manufactured boundaries.

Isaac Vazquez Avila
S.
Oil pastel, acrylic, gouache on canvas
10 x 8 inches
2025

A viewer who wants answers will not find them here, at least not explicitly. Vazquez Avila isn't trying to share something he understands and has chosen to depict. Rather, he beckons us toward a courtship about the transference of feelings, involuntary movements, and the temperature of the self. The authenticity and immediacy of his process is what a viewer will experience. By stripping away recognizable imagery, Vazquez Avila's practice seems to dissolve the world; he dismembers the terrain of what is expected, reducing it to its most primitive form. There are shards of visual clues about what he is doing, which will wet your appetite, but don't mistake the alluring appetizers for the main course. Vazquez Avila's compositions have a subtle tension, ensuring the viewer's engagement with the whole is in a state of cohesive fluidity. The eye has endless things to explore here, looking for sensibility, but in the process of engaging with color, texture, and shape, one realizes that Vazquez Avila's world is only constrained by his experience, one enveloped by his being, which encompasses his private and subjective presence.  

Vazquez Avila exhibits seven paintings (the largest 24.5 x 33.5 inches) and nine wood sculptures (the largest 26 x 21.5 x 10 inches). The exhibition "Painting Head / Body Sculpture" at pt.2 Gallery runs until September 6, 2025.