The Liar, the copy of the Liar - 1

Through a conceptually based art practice encompassing actions, film, painting, and drawing, Francis Alÿs contributed to the revitalization of the contemporary Mexican art scene at the beginning of the 1990s. In 1993, he chose particular still images to illustrate interventions he enacted in the streets. Choosing small-format canvases, Alÿs painted the same recurrent character of a man in a suit, with a piece of furniture or some other object, performing a range of different physical activities.


Alÿs directly borrowed the style of these paintings from images encountered in the streets of his Centro Histórico neighborhood in Mexico City, where metal sheets painted by sign painters are propped on sidewalks or hung above storefronts. Shortly after his first paintings were made, the artist felt "the temptation to return these images to the ones that inspired them," initiating The Sign Painting Project, a cycle of site-specific interventions in the public space.


For The Liar, the Copy of the Liar 1, Alÿs commissioned several rotulistas (the common name for painters who run workshops producing handmade commercial signs and billboards called rótulos) to make three enlarged copies of his own painting depicting two slim men wearing gray suits. One of the men hides his face underneath the flap of the other figure’s jacket, showing a sense of estrangement and the uncanny that bears affinities to the Dadaist and Surrealist avant-gardes.


In contrast to Alÿs’s small picture in oil and wax on canvas, reminiscent of Flemish miniature portraits, the enamel painted metal sheets are meant to endure outdoor conditions. Adapting the artist-imposed subject with a certain level of creative freedom, the rotulistas featured the suited men with slightly different physiognomies and a wide range of contrasting colors of hair and skin.


The Liar, the Copy of the Liar 1 explores the concept of original and copy since the original painting itself derives from street advertisements designed to sell a product, such as a man’s suit. With the repetition of the same picture and the multiplicity of authors, Alÿs questions the idea of paintings as unique and original objects, and by extension, the role of the artist–whom he ironically calls "the liar"—within the world of production, distribution and consumption of images.