COMO SIEMPRE

Isaac Vazquez Avila

Como Siempre/Like Always

Opening Reception February 24, 2024 at 6 pm

Exhibition on view until Saturday, April 6, 2024

Pt. 2 Gallery is pleased to announce Como Siempre/Like Always, our third solo exhibition with San Francisco-based artist Isaac Vazquez Avila. These works, which include paintings and sculptures, developed through Vazquez’s daily walks throughout his Bernal Heights neighborhood. In these excursions, the artist collected visual and physical materials for his compositions. These found parts —calling and responding to each other— form visual conversations. The exhibition title is the phrase Vazquez’s father consistently says in response to “¿como estas?”  It is an acknowledgment of constant change, no matter how things may seem from a particular perspective or moment. 

Vazquez’s art practice continually investigates the complexities of material and place. In this new body of work, he takes a deeper approach to the surface. Two-dimensional works feature incisions into the panel surface, exposing the textures beneath. The roughness of the raw wood contrast with soft applications of color that appear to float above the surface. These overlapping shapes push forward and back on the picture plane. This layering of shapes includes letters, partial words, and even entire phrases that invite a play between text and image/linguistic and visual. His sculptures, which will be displayed on a custom re-purposed produce shelf, evoke joy in the object, juxtapositions, and surface in ways that are distinct from but in relation to paintings on panel. Vazquez’s attention to the conversations between each part of his sculptures imbues them with intimacy at every scale. Through this body of work, Vazquez asks us to resist being overwhelmed by the complexities of our seemingly mundane surroundings. Instead,he invites us to see the overarching “like always” in particular fragments and relationships around us. 

Isaac Vazquez Avila (b. 1983, Mexico City) works and lives in San Francisco. He has taught studio courses at California College of the Arts and the University of California Berkeley, where he earned his MFA in 2016. In addition to solo and group exhibitions, Vazquez has created murals for venues, including the Oakland Coliseum, Facebook, and Art Market at Fort Mason. Vazquez is also a creative researcher for UC Berkeley’s Global Urban Humanities Initiative. Supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Global Urban Humanities, Vazquez has conducted studies in Mexico City regarding art and urban life. He will also be contributing visual materials to the project’s publications.

Words by Jez Flores-Garcia