Galería OMR, Mexico City / formerly Private Collection, Latin America

2nd part also signed and dated in pencil on the reverse: F. Alÿs 1996

A man in a suit, a cushion-like object and an object resembling a mattress enter into an unusual relationship with one another. Nothing in the scene seems immediately explicable: the man’s posture recalls that of a rider, yet appears strangely staged. It is precisely this tension between the everyday and the enigmatic that gives “The Liar, the Copy of the Liar” of 1996 its distinctive poetic quality.
Born in Antwerp in 1959, Francis Alÿs moved to Mexico City in 1986, which thereafter became a central point of departure for his artistic practice. The present work was created as part of the Sign Painting Project, a collaboration developed between 1993 and 1996 between Alÿs and advertising sign painters in Mexico City, known as “rotulistas”: Juan García, Enrique Huerta and Emilio Rivera. Alÿs had these professional sign painters reproduce his own paintings on an enlarged scale, deliberately blurring the boundaries between individual artistic expression and skilled craftsmanship.
The depiction of the body is also central to the series. Weight, balance, distance and touch shape the relationship between the figure and its surroundings, while everyday objects lose their original function through their unconventional use. The result is a poetic yet unsettling tension between physical possibility and narrative improbability.
“The Liar, the Copy of the Liar” is not to be understood as a singular, self-contained painting, but as part of an open system. The original image already refers to the aesthetics of advertising and commercial image production: it adopts the visual language of street advertising, which promotes a product, such as a suit. By repeating the same motif and involving multiple makers, Alÿs challenges the notion of the painting as a unique original. The artist himself ironically becomes the “liar”: his authorship occupies a space between invention, copying and the circulation of images. The copy thus becomes not the opposite of the original, but an essential component of artistic thought. At the same time, Alÿs turns his attention to a local form of image-making that is increasingly being displaced by industrially produced advertising. The project therefore brings together an exploration of authorship and reproduction, and of the everyday and the surreal, with a close observation of the social, visual and commercial environment of Mexico City. IS