Untitled, 2006. Acrylic and dry pigment on canvas. 100X200cm

 …In the case of the Mexican artist Plinio Avila, the starting point often appears to be much more preoccupied with the spaces and how we perceive them, more specifically public spaces of one form or another.

Avila’s practice is not confined to painting and is, instead, an eclectic mix of painting, drawing, sculpture and installations. However, it might be fair to say that one of the strands that runs through his work is the application of applied or painted elements, whether this be in a far more traditional form such as paintings of oil on canvas or in the form of a kind of trompe l’oeil employed directly onto sculptures or parts of public spaces. The purpose of these may be to explore or distort the nature of an actual space –such as in his intervention in a public phone booth as part of a project for MARTa, Herford- or on the constructed space in a sculpture drawn from the architecture of domes.

Whether in these more sculptural and site-specific works or more traditional paintings, there does seems to be something of a preoccupation with the social meanings and attributes of public spaces running through his work. In the paintings, executed in a curt modernist quasi-representational style, the trappings of people are everywhere though they themselves may be absent. Occasionally there is a glimpse of peripheral activity; a suitcase on an airport terminal floor that appears to be being moved by a person just out of sight. Are they about to arrive? Or have they already left?

The trappings of human needs and consumption remain heavily present: chairs for them to sit on, shopping trolleys for them to pile food into, altars for their prayers. And, by implication –and the tone of the paintings themselves- we are offered the option of making up the narratives ourselves.

Frequently the works convey a sense that the specific time is very important in what we are seeing. We may never be certain of exactly what time it is or where we are in the narrative sequence, but they convey an expectation of transition.  We may not be certain if this is the moment just before the shopping trolleys are unlocked and the supermarket explodes into a frenzy of shoppers or whether, in fact, it’s just after they have been collected and neatly stored for the quiet hours of the night.  Are the banks of white plastic chairs empty in that moment before a flight arrives or just after departure? We can never be certain. However, we can be certain that, at some point, actual humans will change the places we are observing …

Ken Pratt - Download full text: miseenscene.pdf -

Untitled, 2005. Acrylic and dry pigment on canvas. 130X200cm.

Untitled, 2006. Acrylic and dry pigment on canvas. 130X200cm

Untitled, 2005. Acrylic and dry pigment on canvas. 130X200cm.

Untitled, 2005. Acrylic and dry pigment on canvas. 100X100cm.