Untitled

A surreal presentation of the quotidian, Untitled is a remarkable example of Francis Alÿs’s multipart works in his Sign-Painting Series. In the present work, Alÿs, a Belgian artist living and working in Mexico City, collaborated with a local sign-painter, Emilio Rivera, to produce work that examines the complex structure of production to challenge traditional notions of artistic authorship and authenticity. Drawing from everyday experiences in the contemporary metropolis, Alÿs was inspired by the seductive power of the advertisements that he encountered throughout his neighborhood. Imitating the iconography of tailor shop advertisements in Untitled, Alÿs began the process by making a small painting then passed his original to Rivera, who, in turn, created an enlarged sheet-metal copy, here each in two parts. While John Baldessari started exhibiting paintings made to his specifications by sign painters in 1969, art historian and critic Thomas McEvilley explains, “Alÿs’s system is far more complex, involving first the style seen in the street, then the artist’s imitation of it, then the re-imitation of that by artists of the community from which the ‘original’ had come” (T. McEvilley, Francis Alÿs: The Liar, the Copy of the Liar, Guadalajara, 1994, p. 40).

A manifestation of Alÿs’s unique collaborative process, Untitled’s copied and imitative components share nearly-identical diptych compositions that contain two anonymous male arms, dressed in fitted suits, reaching towards each other–imagery that conjures a mélange of visual referents, from René Magritte’s depictions of generic businessmen in surreal environments, to the iconicity of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Although initially appearing eerily similar, the viewer uncovers subtle differences between these simplistic compositional symmetries. Through a process of translation, rather than mechanical reproduction, the crisp flatness of the blocky, bright colors upon the enlarged metal sheet contrast with the tactile surface of the original oil on canvas. Both compositions present commonplace objects in such a manner that delivers an uncanny tension; the privileged businessman of the street signs, here, is transported from his world of commodification and class structures into a state of vulnerable isolation, where his gestures seem meaningless. Presented as a single unit, Untitled evokes the reciprocity of its production–a process that confounds the tradition of painting by making it inconceivable to pinpoint the stage at which the art act is performed. Embodying the essence of Alÿs’s diverse oeuvre and conjuring the bizarre from the banal, Untitled transgresses artistic genres to expose the distortions embedded within the visual language of reproduction.