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Lot Essay
Created by Francis Alÿs, Emilio Rivera and Enrique Huerta in 1996, the present lot consists of three works from Alÿs’s landmark ‘Sign Painting Project’ (1993-1997). This celebrated series came about through a collaboration between Alÿs and professional local sign painters, known as rótulistas, from Mexico City. Inspired by the flat, brightly-coloured style of the advertising billboards he saw in the city’s historic centre, Alÿs began by painting small canvases in a similar manner, depicting people, urban scenery and everyday objects. The rótulistas would then copy and enlarge his paintings, working in enamel on metal. The resulting panels feature intriguing variations and pictorial effects, sparking questions about authorship, originality and the qualities that distinguish one image of the same subject from another.
These works belong to a subset of sign paintings that focus on exterior spaces, variously named the Installation Project, City Squats or Cityscapes. Sometimes based on Alÿs’s own photographs, they reflect his playful attitude towards the architectural environment. The motif for the present trio is a view of tower blocks against an open sky, with a rooftop plant room emerging from the central building. In the foreground is a building under construction, its floors open to the air. Two wardrobes can be seen on adjacent floors: the upper wardrobe is upside-down, as if the pair are mirroring one another. Alÿs’s initial small canvas depicts this scene in somewhat soft brushstrokes, with a pale green sky and the buildings sharing the same grey colour. Emilio Rivera’s version shifts the position of the wardrobes, elaborates details such as windows, and gives two of the buildings pale yellow facades: the sky is lyrically rendered, with white clouds rippling against blue. Enrique Huerta takes a more crisp, graphic approach, echoing the jade green of Alÿs’s sky, and depicting a complex play of shadow on the uprights of the open building.
Alÿs, who was born in Belgium in 1959, initially trained as an architect. He moved to Mexico City in 1986 at a time of social unrest, and has become renowned for a wide-ranging practice that explores the relationship between politics and poetics, and between individual and collective action. His performances include Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) (1997), where he pushed an ice-block through Mexico City’s streets until it melted away, and When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), for which he recruited 500 volunteers in Peru to move a huge sand dune by ten centimetres. The ‘Sign Painting Project’—at once whimsical and serious—engages with related ideas of labour, belief and transformation that lie at the heart of our understanding of art. In his collaboration with the rótulistas, Alÿs posits himself not as a unique creator but as a single element within a wider societal, economic and cultural network of production and interpretation.
These works belong to a subset of sign paintings that focus on exterior spaces, variously named the Installation Project, City Squats or Cityscapes. Sometimes based on Alÿs’s own photographs, they reflect his playful attitude towards the architectural environment. The motif for the present trio is a view of tower blocks against an open sky, with a rooftop plant room emerging from the central building. In the foreground is a building under construction, its floors open to the air. Two wardrobes can be seen on adjacent floors: the upper wardrobe is upside-down, as if the pair are mirroring one another. Alÿs’s initial small canvas depicts this scene in somewhat soft brushstrokes, with a pale green sky and the buildings sharing the same grey colour. Emilio Rivera’s version shifts the position of the wardrobes, elaborates details such as windows, and gives two of the buildings pale yellow facades: the sky is lyrically rendered, with white clouds rippling against blue. Enrique Huerta takes a more crisp, graphic approach, echoing the jade green of Alÿs’s sky, and depicting a complex play of shadow on the uprights of the open building.
Alÿs, who was born in Belgium in 1959, initially trained as an architect. He moved to Mexico City in 1986 at a time of social unrest, and has become renowned for a wide-ranging practice that explores the relationship between politics and poetics, and between individual and collective action. His performances include Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) (1997), where he pushed an ice-block through Mexico City’s streets until it melted away, and When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), for which he recruited 500 volunteers in Peru to move a huge sand dune by ten centimetres. The ‘Sign Painting Project’—at once whimsical and serious—engages with related ideas of labour, belief and transformation that lie at the heart of our understanding of art. In his collaboration with the rótulistas, Alÿs posits himself not as a unique creator but as a single element within a wider societal, economic and cultural network of production and interpretation.