Stuck in the middle

In her most recent body of work, Mexican artist Pia Camil incorporates wooden blinds that function as windows embedded within the pictorial surface. Conceived as landscapes, the paintings evoke the experience of looking outward from a domestic interior; yet this direction of the gaze can be reversed, suggesting an inward-looking perspective as well. This ambiguity transforms the window into a metaphor for the ways in which subjectivity may be understood as a reflection of the landscape—or even as a landscape in its own right. 

Drawing from her recent personal experience—Camil articulates, through these works, the tensions and contradictions between the natural world and domestic life, between inside and outside. The lattice screens do not operate solely as formal devices, but as liminal elements that destabilize the traditional boundaries of painting: what academic aesthetics would have regarded as frame or support is here integrated into the work as an active agent of meaning. 

In Pia Camil’s paintings, presents at the exhibition, the landscape is observed from within a domestic interior, framed by the window, and at the same time rendered through a subjective gaze that emerges from the artist’s own sensorial experience. However, nature is not treated merely as a landscape to be depicted. Rather, Camil portraits the forest’s personhood, a reflection of our own. 

Within this intermediate space, the artist challenges the notion of the artwork’s closed autonomy and instead proposes an aesthetic that emerges from the everyday, where the domestic, the functional, and the sensorial intertwine. Painting thus ceases to function as a transparent window onto the external world and becomes, instead, a threshold—a site of passage in which landscape, interiority, and lived experience are mutually reflected. BL