Last year, Francis Alÿs (@francis_alys_official) was awarded the prestigious Wolfgang Hahn Prize, and the corresponding exhibition of his work is showing at Köln's Mu­se­um Lud­wig until 7 April.

The exhibition is among those featured on the event listings page, which now includes details of BLAG Meet: Inside Issue 04, and two forthcoming BLAG Chats. More on these next week...

The focus of the show is Alÿs' Sign Painting Project from the 1990s, produced in collaboration with three sign painters in Mexico City. It was inspired by the city's hand-painted street advertisements, and the illustrations that adorned them.

Well before the advent of TikTok and Instagram reels, Alÿs was documenting his work with video, and this short film shows a small part of the Sign Painting Project process.

  

The project started in 1993 when Alÿs commissioned a number of sign painters to paint enlarged versions of images ('models') that he had produced. They were given free reign to interpret these, and their output fed into his creation of new models, and so on in a conceivably never-ending, iterative process. By the time the project ended in 1997, around 400 individual paintings had been produced from a body of 74 initial models.

Large gallery space with white display walls and a shelf on which are placed numerous paintings with some on top of others.
Paintings from the Sign Painting Project on show in 2006 at the Schaulager gallery in Münchenstein, Switzerland. Photo from the exhibition catalogue.

Although he initially worked with a larger group of sign painters, Alÿs quickly settled on a core team of three collaborators: Juan Garciá, Enrique Huerta, and Emilio Rivera. A catalogue of their collective output was published in 2010 following an exhibition at the Schaulager gallery in Münchenstein, Switzerland. This catalogue includes three critical essays, from which these Alÿs quotations are taken to place the project in context.

"The style of these paintings — and to some extent, its male character — was directly borrowed from street advertisements encountered in my neighbourhood in the Centro Histórico. 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."
Street corner with a shop adorned with various pieces of signage, including the main fascia sign that reads "Rótulos".
Enrique Huerta's workshop in Mexico City in 1996. Still from the film, Set Theory.
"My collaboration with them [sign painters] sprang from a frustration with my own inability to communicate to a wider public the situations I wanted to explore and develop at the time, whether in the street actions I was carrying out or the interior scenes I depicted in my paintings. Impressed by the communicative power of their adverts, I began by borrowing that iconography for use in my own works, but this did not convince me either, so finally I decided to directly incorporate the rótulistas into the confection and production of my images so as to achieve the effect and clarity I was after."
Sign shop/artist studio with people at work, and signs and paintings at various stages of completion on the walls, table, and floor.
Juan García (right) at work on the 'Set Theory' series. Photo: Francis Alÿs.
“By the summer of 1993 I had completed a first body of paintings and the temptation grew to return these images to the ones that inspired them. I commissioned various sign painters to produce enlarged copies of my original images. 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 the 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, and to reduce their market value by producing an open edition of images while maintaining copyrights on each of them."
Two paintings side by side depicting a chair, a table with a cone falling off it, and a hand reaching towards the cone.
Untitled (1994) by Francis Alÿs (left) and Emilio Rivera. Photos © Jochen Müller, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen.
"The project gradually deviated from its original illustrative purpose as the copying process is becoming more important. By now it doesn't matter whether you are looking at a model, a copy, or a copy of a copy. I myself have started copying my own models, under the influence of the new versions."
Sign shop/artist studio with men at work on paintings, and various stools, tables, and shelves storing materials.
Work-in-progress for the Sign Painting Project at Enrique Huerta's workshop in Mexico City, 1994.
"The project was an attempt to sabotage the market by invading it with a massive and unlimited number of paintings. Maintaining copyrights on the images was supposed to enable us to impose the rules of the game to the galleries. Over time many works were re-sold and dispersed, some got isolated from their pairs and lost their dimension of units of a larger production. The market recuperated them years later and twisted the original project by reducing them to mere auction house commodities. The original proposal of a social experience of collaboration and exchange in between four persons in the tradition of a 16th century atelier got lost along the way. My intent to maintain low market value art items failed."
Book cover dominated by a photograph of a man in an artist's studio working on a painting while sitting on a stool.
The 2010 catalogue for the Sign Painting Project. The catalogue can be browsed in its entirety here on Francis Alÿs website. While some pages appear blank, they becomes visible when you click/tap to enlarge to full screen.
Francis Alÿs: 2023 Wolfgang Hahn Prize is showing at Köln's Mu­se­um Lud­wig until 7 April. With thanks to Sebastian Karbowiak (@kompagnon.letters) for alerting me to the exhibition, and this fascinating project.

Bonus Francis Alÿs: Retoque

When I shared the post about 'roadliners' on social media last year, someone replied with a picture of a man down on his knees painting a yellow line in the centre of a road with a brush.

It turns out that this was Francis Alÿs' contribution to an arts festival in Panama in 2008. It's called Painting/Retoque ('retouch') and the performance was documented in another short film.

  

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