Mario Ayala
Mario Ayala was raised amid the car-centric culture in his small town west of Los Angeles. “Music album covers, skateboarding, [street] signage, and car customization” were visual markers of his childhood, he says. After studying painting and drawing at the San Francisco Art Institute, Ayala kept returning to the idea of cars as art. In his spare time, he photographed “the rear [window] of these vehicles that I would come across, whether I was back home in LA or on my commute or traveling,” he says, a process he called “research while driving.” Over the past two years, he turned this collection of photographs into Seven Vans, a series of life-size paintings of the backs of vans, now on display at the Contemporary Art Museum of Houston—Ayala’s first solo exhibition.
Ayala felt inspired, in part, by the architecture of the museum’s exhibition galleries, which “always dictated the idea for the show,” he says. “The subterranean space [mirrored] parking garages.” During the initial planning stages, he ordered custom canvases shaped like each van from his selected photographs. He then used acrylic (or in one case, oil) to complete the trompe-l’oeil paintings. For some, he used an airbrush tool to mimic how a car may be detailed in a shop, even mixing glass cleaner with acrylic to create a patina similar to a spray-paint job. Each image was meant to be a portrait not just of the car, but the owner, as well. “There’s a certain class that’s being presented in the work — or certain kinds of individuals — and hopefully that opens up more questions” for the viewer, Ayala says. “There’s a van that’s from my orthodontist, and a lot of them, actually, I would see pretty often at my laundromat.” Ayala notes the utilitarian nature of vans and how they’re often used by businesses. These seven in particular “lived many lives in comparison to other vehicles. They felt more enriched, for one reason or another, with time. And the fact that they could hold more than one human or had the purpose of moving many individuals kept me interested in them,” because of connections to migration and consumer culture, he says.
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