Art

Mario Ayala (b. 1991, Los Angeles) reimagines a contemporary landscape where identity, observation, and the presence of material fact play equal roles. In his paintings, Ayala brings together figures and forms drawn from every corner of his experience living on the West Coast. Ayala’s work lends interest in traditions and techniques with strong visual ties to California, such as muralism, tattooing, and industrial techniques used in automobile painting and commercial signage. Ayala’s influences also extend into postwar art historical movements such as the Cool School of Los Angeles and Bay Area Funk art. Ayala’s highly personal, often surreal, tableaux are vivid representations of the way in which images course through the world, carrying with them fragments of the past, present, and a future still in formation. His creations live as collectively inspired documents that reflect issues, energies, and aesthetics alive in Mexican American, Latin, and Brown communities throughout the region. Ayala’s sculptures, site-specific works, and collaborations embody his capacity to envision the local and the global as interwoven phenomena. Like his paintings, they locate surprising—and even unsettling—moments of cohesion in a world defined by multiplicity and rapid, ever-changing flux. Ayala (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA) has been the subject of solo and two-person exhibitions at CAC Málaga, Spain (2024); David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Jeffrey Deitch, New York, NY (2022), and Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, CA (2021). Recent group exhibitions include Xican-a.o.x. Body, Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL (2024) and The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture at the Riverside Art Museum, CA (2023); Prospect 2024, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, CA (2024); Sitting on Chrome: Mario Ayala, rafa esparza, and Guadalupe Rosales, SFMOMA, San Francisco, CA (2023–2024); Together in Time: Selections from the Hammer Contemporary Art Collection, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2023); Hot Concrete: LA to HK, K11 Musea, Hong Kong (2022); and Made in L.A. 2020: a version, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2020). His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; and The Broad, Los Angeles, CA. Ayala lives and works in Los Angeles. Ayala was thinking about several different elements when conceiving of So Many Tears. The most obvious one is that the central image is a depiction of Tupac peeking through a wave, as if slowly tearing through. The painting takes its title from a song on his album Me Against The World. Tupac is recognized as a prominent Los Angeles figure whose music is still played daily on local radio, and as someone who wrote lyrics about identity issues concerning being a person of color, not only in Los Angeles but globally. This song talks about death, and his worries about entering the afterlife. At times he speaks directly to God, raising concerns about who he is, what he’s done, and where he comes from. He expresses concern with the apparent inevitability of a life that seems to have chosen him—coming from poverty, struggling as a youth, involvement in gang life—and as a result determined his choices and the way others perceive him. The superimposition of Tupac and the curling wave is meant to be a literal, yet also poetic metaphor for the title, So Many Tears. Mario imagined the wave as an exaggerated image that could act as a stand–in measurement of all of the tears that Tupac shed. The painting is, in this sense, an overwhelming, melancholic depiction of all of the struggles and emotions people of color experience, especially in LA. When framed in this way, the wave, a classic symbol of idyllic Los Angeles life, takes on a much more noir tone and acts as a truer symbol of what Los Angeles really is. Mario felt that the most impactful way of expressing this vital issue would be to execute the work on the largest possible surface he could fit in his studio.