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Lot Essay
Aesthetically elegant and fundamentally innovative, Untitled is part of a major body of early work called the Sign Painting Project that embodies and anticipates some of the central concerns in Francis Alÿs’s diverse and intelligent practice. Inspired partly by sixteenth-century artist ateliers, the project was a collaboration between the artist and three Mexican sign-painters, a ‘colectivo’ consisting of Juan García, Enrique Huerta and Emilio Rivera. The style of the paintings was influenced by Mexico City, where Alÿs had lived since 1986. The aesthetic of these pictures mimics the street advertisements found throughout his neighbourhood in the Centro Historico. “These metal sheets painted by sign painters are propped on sidewalks or hung over storefronts and they immediately seduced me by the communicative power of their iconography,” he has said (F. Alys, quoted in F. Alys, ed. T. Vischer, Sign Painting Project with Juan Garcia, Emilio Rivera, Enrique Huerta, exh. cat., Steidl, 2010).
Executed between 1995-6, Untitled consists of five separate figurative paintings (two are diptychs, for a total of seven panels), executed on supports that are of various mediums, sizes and shapes. As is characteristic of the series, the suite of paintings depicts a man in a suit seen from behind, interacting with pieces of furniture – in this case, a wooden desk, chair and cupboard, plus a ruler. Alÿs was interested in “subjecting the body of the protagonist to a range of physically feasible relations of weight, balance, tension etc.” (F. Alys, quoted in ibid.) Five of the pictures seem to show a man imagining the ruler—or the distance it measures—between his hands, while the other two show the ruler by itself. They share strikingly clear and detailed brushwork, a surreal and graphic composition, and a harmonious color palette of plaster pinks, fresh greens and citrus yellow.
Envisioned as a learning process of one another through close collaboration, in 1993 Alÿs commissioned three sign painters to help produce enlarged copies of his original paintings. He explains the process of the sign painting project here: “Once several versions had been completed, I produced a new ‘model’ that incorporated the most significant elements of each sign painter’s interpretation. This compiled image was in turn used as the base for a new generation of copies made by sign painters, and so on, ad infinitum, according to market demand. The underlying intention behind this collaboration process was also to work against the idea of paintings as unique objects” (F. Alÿs, quoted in ibid.) Alÿs found, that over the years of the collaboration, the models themselves began to alter in anticipation of the collaboration with another artist. In this way, his work plays with the idea of authorship, authenticity and origins. Rather than distancing himself from his source of inspiration, as would be traditional in the creation of an artwork, he reverses the process by returning the image to its origins in commercial street art. In doing so, he plays with the idea of originality, while also exploring what it means to be an image maker in an ever-changing world.
Executed between 1995-6, Untitled consists of five separate figurative paintings (two are diptychs, for a total of seven panels), executed on supports that are of various mediums, sizes and shapes. As is characteristic of the series, the suite of paintings depicts a man in a suit seen from behind, interacting with pieces of furniture – in this case, a wooden desk, chair and cupboard, plus a ruler. Alÿs was interested in “subjecting the body of the protagonist to a range of physically feasible relations of weight, balance, tension etc.” (F. Alys, quoted in ibid.) Five of the pictures seem to show a man imagining the ruler—or the distance it measures—between his hands, while the other two show the ruler by itself. They share strikingly clear and detailed brushwork, a surreal and graphic composition, and a harmonious color palette of plaster pinks, fresh greens and citrus yellow.
Envisioned as a learning process of one another through close collaboration, in 1993 Alÿs commissioned three sign painters to help produce enlarged copies of his original paintings. He explains the process of the sign painting project here: “Once several versions had been completed, I produced a new ‘model’ that incorporated the most significant elements of each sign painter’s interpretation. This compiled image was in turn used as the base for a new generation of copies made by sign painters, and so on, ad infinitum, according to market demand. The underlying intention behind this collaboration process was also to work against the idea of paintings as unique objects” (F. Alÿs, quoted in ibid.) Alÿs found, that over the years of the collaboration, the models themselves began to alter in anticipation of the collaboration with another artist. In this way, his work plays with the idea of authorship, authenticity and origins. Rather than distancing himself from his source of inspiration, as would be traditional in the creation of an artwork, he reverses the process by returning the image to its origins in commercial street art. In doing so, he plays with the idea of originality, while also exploring what it means to be an image maker in an ever-changing world.