Press Release - unruly inland scenes by Isaac Vazquez Avila
Isaac Vazquez Avila
Title
Medium on canvas
17 x 21 inches framed by artist
2026
unruly inland scenes
a solo exhibition by
Isaac Vazquez Avila
Opening July 25th at 6pm
pt.2
1523b Webster St.
Oakland, CA
pt.2 Gallery is pleased to present unruly inland scenes, a solo exhibition of new paintings by San Francisco-based artist Isaac Vazquez Avila. The exhibition marks his fifth solo presentation with the gallery and features a new body of work that expands his ongoing exploration of place, perception, and abstraction.
For Vazquez Avila, painting is the opposite of efficiency. It is a process of slowing down, allowing uncertainty to remain, and making space for unexpected discoveries. Working across multiple canvases at once, he builds, obscures, revises, and rediscovers forms through an intuitive process that balances intention with chance. Influenced in part by his collage practice, he creates conditions for unforeseen relationships to emerge, allowing each painting to reveal itself gradually. The resulting works carry traces of both deliberation and improvisation, raising questions about how much can be controlled and how much must simply be allowed to happen.
Living and working in the Bay Area, where water, open space, and shifting light shape everyday experience, Vazquez Avila found these elements gradually entering his paintings. Rather than depicting specific locations, the works absorb the atmosphere of the landscape through color, distance, and spatial relationships. Horizons, vegetation, bodies of water, and interior spaces emerge only fleetingly, creating compositions that hover between observation and memory, landscape and psychological space.
Isaac Vazquez Avila
Title
Medium on canvas
10 x 15.5 inches framed by artist
2026
Vazquez Avila embraces restraint in his current studio practice. While earlier works often drew from the visual density of the urban environment, these paintings leave room for ambiguity and pause. Forms drift across expanses of color and visual information is carefully withheld. In the smaller works, this compression creates an intimate psychological charge; in the larger paintings, it opens onto expansive spatial fields that suggest weather, terrain, and shifting perspectives. Together, the paintings invite viewers to linger in uncertainty, where perception remains fluid and meaning emerges slowly.
Isaac Vazquez Avila (b. 1983, Mexico City) is a painter and sculptor living in the Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. Avila received his BA from San Francisco State University in Latino/a Studies and an MFA in 2016 from the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to his practice, he designs murals for public and commercial clients and has been commissioned by the SFMOMA to paint a mural as part of their Bay Area Walls program which is scheduled to open summer of August 2026. Avila has exhibited his work at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, San Rafael; Blunk Space, Point Reyes; Right Window, San Francisco; Tlaloc Studios, Los Angeles; Adobe Books,San Francisco; Et.Al,San Francisco; and pt.2 Gallery, Oakland.