Francis Alÿs: The Private View

The highly explosive mega-city as an artistic referential space: sheep surround a flagpole on Mexico City’s giant central square, the Zócalo; a dog roams the streets and alleys, and the artist himself wanders through the capital of his adopted home for hours as a kind of secret observer, as an agent of his own artistic activity. Expansive, long-term projects dominate the work of the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, who is one of the most internationally renowned artists of his generation. The exhibition in Leverkusen combines works from his early period, a few years after his move to Mexico City, creating a comprehensive urban narrative.

Francis Alÿs (*1959 in Antwerp, BE) studied architecture in Belgium and Italy. Having gone to Mexico City for an earthquake relief project for the Belgian government in the late 1980s, the city became a central theme of his early work, with all its contradictions and complexity. The megametropolis is presented in the exhibition as the source of inspiration and site for his contemplative walks (Paseos), with a 24-part photographic work, Sunpath (1999), and two video pieces. The central flagpole on the politically historic and at the same time socially problematic central square, the Zócalo, is not just an object that sheep are led around in reference to a concrete event during the political unrest in 1968 (Cuentos Patrióticos, 1997, in collaboration with Rafael Ortega). It also serves as a linchpin in the video piece Zócalo (1999) for a “social performance,” whose actors includes random people who happened to be in the space.

The figure of the dog, which is addressed in a sculptural and painterly way in several works in the exhibition, also plays a central role in Francis Alÿs’ work. It functions as a consciously placed counterpart, as a subversive element that penetrates into rational systems of order. Just like the plot of a game that does not follow any kind of economic logic, the dog is not just an “intellectual” stumbling stone, but also opens up a certain spiritual joy in experimentation and freedom of movement.

Walking, as a political act is an essential aspect of Alÿs’ works, as are the concise gestures or “banal” actions that can be read as signs of global, political conditions or geopolitical processes. Ultimately, they operate as signs for the consequences of globalisation, including urban or national demarcations and migration (for example, in the series Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River).

The artist developed The Sign Painting Project in collaboration with the Mexican sign painters (rótulistas) Juan García, Emilio Rivera and Enrique Huerta over several years starting in the 1990s. The style of the paintings and their communicative expressiveness makes reference here to the billboards Alÿs saw in his neighbourhood in the historical city centre. The artist asked the sign painters to create enlarged copies based on his small paintings, which in turn contained certain elements that have inspired him to create other paintings. This process, which works in a similar way as the children’s game “chinese whisper,” has also been continued with conscious reference to the laws of the “market”. The underlying idea for this subversive art is to irritate the art market, which places an enormous value on unique paintings. This unusual artistic process also raises questions about collaboration, authorship, copyrights, and the role of the model. 

The exhibition, which originated in close collaboration with intentionally anonymous collectors of Francis Alÿs’ works, presents pieces, some of which have never been shown, making them accessible to the public for the first time.

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