Bio
Israel André Ávila White
From a Mexican father and an American mother, I was born in Mexico in 1982. Except for brief periods in which I lived in the United States and Michoacán, Mexico, I have spent my entire life in Mexico City. As a child, I was encouraged at home by drawing and a taste for art and science. My childhood and adolescence always accompanied by materials for drawing, painting and music, disciplines that I embraced to a greater or lesser extent throughout this first couple of decades of life.
This fluctuation between different aesthetic activities ended up defining what I would study in the university. Design and Visual Communication was the race in which design, visual arts, video, music and photography converged; subjects that interested me to explore in order to formally develop my previous interests. Thus i entered the National Autonomous University of Mexico (2001-2004).
A deeper understanding of art, communication, semiotics, image, among other theoretical approaches, expanded my understanding and gave me access to a number of expressive and communicative possibilities that I began to capture in the different academic and labor projects that followed .
It was during my first jobs as a designer when I faced the disenchantment with the way in which the work flow was given in an office, and the limited interest that there was in the "market" for a methodical and careful design that allow me tol use everything that i had learned al college.
Art had been maintained (at that time) as a veiled possibility but more and more as a liking that grew on each visit to a museum and in every effort to make a design more effective and attractive. It was at the age of 25 when I decided to make a change in my life plan because, until then, my goal was to have my own design office. Then I chose to direct my life towards the plastic arts. My training as a designer gave me enough theoretical knowledge, but in pictorial art, I had many gaps.
In 2008 I entered in the painting and drawing shop of human figure in the Academy of San Carlos (UNAM) where I had my first contact with the technique and pictorial study, and at the same time i met many of the people who marked my artistic training. There I painted my first original painting (Woman in armchair, cubist style) and, after two years in the academy, I ended my stay in the academy. After this, i continued my pictorial production outside of every art institute for about 8 years, throughout which i made Cubist, Surrealist and Expressionist artworks with continuous references to classical art pieces such as the Virgin with child or Piety. During this period I devoted a lot of energy to studying history and art theory, also, I had the opportunity to visit important museums in México and Europe, as well as to go deeper into the painting and the life of dozens of art masters.
In 2011 I had my first achievements in painting, I was selected as a finalist in the "Art club" contest organized by Reforma newspaper (one of the most important in Mexico) with the piece The juggler, and I performed my first pair of solo exhibitions in cultural forums in México city. Also, I made my first art sales and I could spend time writing my first texts related to the study of art.
In 2016 I started studying at the Goya Cultural Forum where I was able to do what, until now, are my studies of pictorial technique richer and more advanced. Since then, i have refined my work with oil painting, and I have explored other materials, which has allowed me to be able to capture more effectively what I have learned over the 15 previous years.
Between my main influencers until 2019 are Vermeer, Francis Bacon, Picasso, Dalí, Braque, El Greco, Lucian Freud, Goya, Rembrandt, Magritte, and contemporary artists such as George Condo, Cecily Brown, Peter Doing, Albert Oehlen or Neo Rauch. I intend to continue nourishing myself with the arts of all times and regions until I reach my great goal: to make a painting interesting and valuable enough to keep present when I am gone.
