The explosive, migraine-inducing polychrome advertisements flanking Mexico City’s Anillo Periférico highway offer commuters a nonpareil optical assault. But look closer, says Mexican artist Pia Camil, and you’ll find some “blind spots” that break up the visual clutter with flashes of understated beauty. See, when a billboard falls out of use in Mexico, or the rent isn’t paid, mischievous sign owners simply reshuffle the panels and leave them scrambled like some muted roadside Rorschach, known locally as espectaculares.
“When you’re driving through Periférico, it’s like billboard, billboard, billboard, and when one is abstract it’s the anomaly, a nice eye rest in this fucked-up madness,” says Camil, who spent years assembling photo archives of the city, which tipped her off to the preponderance of large-scale municipal abstractions. “I thought it was quite a nice thing to engage with and how it could immediately become a light critique on a failed capitalist economy.”
Those critiques are meant to examine the “aestheticization of failure” in the form of heavily labored, hand-dyed and -sewn canvases and curtains that give new meaning to these derelict signs. As such, they’ve become quite the spectacle themselves in recent solo shows at Paris’s Galerie Sultana, where Camil covered the entire space with six backlit espectaculares curtains. During Mexico’s Zona Maco fair, in February, she hung more curtains over various walls and windows (opposite accompanying ceramics) throughout the three-room project space at the blue-chip Galería OMR. And this month in Los Angeles, at Blum & Poe, she’s installing a more minimal exhibition—a single curtain and a couple of paintings in the gallery’s front room. A freestanding shelving unit of her design (with an attached canvas and more ceramics) will become partition walls that allow viewers very direct interaction with the work while establishing a traffic flow, so to speak, through the space.
“The fact that her work stems from her location and being inspired by the city is really important, and the dialogue between Mexico City and Los Angeles is really strong. I think what’s interesting is that she’s not only critiquing abstract and modernist work but pushing that critique to the next level,” says Blum & Poe’s artist liaison, Sarvia Jasso, who met Camil in Mexico last fall at her home studio, where the artist spends hours upon hours cutting patterns in her garage, then boiling dyes and drying canvases on her roof. “I got to see one of the curtains hung in her living room. It was quite nice because she’s very interested in the idea of the work becoming functional, so actually having it in a domestic space and her living with it also was a very interesting exploration. That curtain later went to Paris.”
Camil’s work has taken on a more rigorous, process-based approach over the past five years, during which time she’s also completed her “Highway Follies” series of shaped-canvas paintings and color-tinted photos evoking Mexico’s version of Robert Smithson’s “Ruins in Reverse” notion, as expressed in his seminal 1967 photo essay A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey: “This is the opposite of the ‘romantic ruin’ because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.” Still, her instinct to break out of the studio and embrace the street is at the heart of her practice.
“I have a thing for construction sites,” says Camil, sipping a glass of tequila in the art-filled foyer in the home of Patricia Ortiz Monasterio and Jaime Riestra, the power couple behind OMR and the grandparents of her son, Guadalupe, with boyfriend Mateo Riestra. While her recent ascent to OMR’s vaunted Maco-timed exhibition—opposite the white-hot Jose Dávila—might seem like a form of nepotism, Camil showed for years with La Central gallery in Bogotá, staged her own shows in commercial buildings around Mexico, and first approached the gallery as a curator (showing her works alongside those of Dávila and Stefan Brüggemann) and a musician (in a month-long residency of sound-and zine-making with her former band, El Resplandor). And this happened only after years of late- night talks with Mateo’s younger brother, Cristobal Riestra, the gallery’s heir apparent, about what the five-year-old project space could be.
“It’s a relationship that was always family first. They were very prudish about my work. They knew I made art, but for five years they probably never saw anything but a few drawings,” says Camil, pointing to a Kafkaesque landscape of hers (an old birthday gift to Jaime)—marked with the phrase “He’s Not What He Thought He Once Was”—which hangs on the wall above the elder Riestra’s staircase. “I very, very consciously made a decision to operate in a place that’s not necessarily close to all these conflicting relationships.”
While the Riestra boys were born into the art world, Camil’s place in it was never a sure thing. Her parents divorced when she was young, and had it not been for her mother’s sending her to train with a printmaker at the age of 13—which later evolved into addictive life-drawing sessions—she may well have followed her dream to become an architect. With encouragement from an American history teacher, she applied to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she was accepted after initially being waitlisted.
“For me, RISD just gave the right type of mentality of things I still use to this day: how to assess your work, how to put a good body of work together, how to have the right discipline and questions for your work,” she says. “It was quite a critical school. RISD was like hard-core studio practice, especially the painting.”
That said, during a study-abroad program in Rome, Camil was given a studio but couldn’t focus, with the city’s layer cake of history beckoning just outside her door. So she assembled photo archives of the Piazza del Popolo, and when she spotted road crews repaving the sampietrini streets, she’d mark down the location and return at night to paint eyes on the cobblestones. “It was like romantic graffiti,” says Camil, who was also drawing like crazy, a practice she’s since abandoned. “In my mind, I have a personality problem. If you see my drawings, they’re very loose, wacky, very sexual, very autobiographical—and that’s a lot of the reason I stopped doing them, because it’s too invested. It was haunting me in my drawings. I would leave a drawing and I would dream of that drawing all night.”
This desire to transfer deep physical (and emotional) intensity into artwork started with hours spent in the city’s museums on weekends as a young child. “My parents brought me to some really incredible shows, and one I remember specifically was Anselm Kiefer, those pyramid paintings he did,” she says. “In Mexico, you had the murals, so it wasn’t as much the scale of the Kiefers but how fucking physical they are. I’d never seen anything that intense. I was there for hours and hours on end. I couldn’t leave it.”
For Camil, Mexico—more than any other city—has that same pull. “New York has lost it. What I like about Mexico is that it’s still chaotic and in the making, and it still has this sense of invention to it. In Mexico there’s always a sense of ingenuity,” she says. “There’s a very nice anecdote that Mateo tells me about a visit André Breton had to Mexico. He designed a chair and did the drawing in perspective, took it to a carpenter, and when he came back a few days later, the carpenter had made a chair in perspective. It’s this nice Mexican way of not seeing things for what they are.”
Whether that means espectaculares as curtains or Jacuzzi-size, sprayed-concrete sculptures of empty pools—the next project she’s contemplating—Camil’s work will always be precarious, she insists. “Precarious means you find a way to fucking do something with what you have and solve things in a creative way.”
A version of this article appears in the July/August 2014 issue of Modern Painters magazine.
