Francis Alys

Amberes, Belgium - 1959

            Francis Alÿs lives liminally between two worlds. Born in Belgium but residing in Mexico City, his works also reverberate this amphibious existence. Urban spaces, with their processes of permanent change and chaotic conflict, their social and political disputes, become privileged stages for his artistic practice. In Belgium, Alÿs trained as an architect, and in the early 1990s, already settled in Mexico, he began to develop his work as a visual and audiovisual artist. However, behind his conversion to the art world unfolds, like an invisible and shining web, his original formation.

            It is from this mixture that he approaches and interprets the interaction between the environment and people. Alÿs has a keen reflection on the place of the artist in the present. The displacement of the artist as an exceptional figure and his transformation into a more mundane subject cause art to lose its elitist character. His ideas challenge the romantic image of the artist and account for the tensions between a democratizing spirit and a commercial one in the realm of contemporary art. The power of collective action often takes a central place in his work. In one of his projects, he recruited hundreds of volunteers to move a sand dune ten centimeters. In another, "The Green Line," he marked, using a can of green paint, a line along the boundary between Israel and Palestine, to recreate the original demarcation of the border between these two territories established in 1948.

            In projects like "Untitled (Sign Painting Project)" (1993-97), in which he hired sign painters to replicate his works, he also works on the ideas of authorship and collaboration. What he values and emphasizes is what a work provokes, no matter whose idea it is; what matters is what it generates as it circulates in the world. Circulating, traversing, walking, are all part of his way of thinking and creating. To mature a plan, Alÿs walks. Movement and cyclical repetitions, as well as the mechanics of regression and progression, are key points in which the actions of his art strain the territories, the poetic and the political, to examine memory and mythology through the intersection of disciplines ranging from painting to performance.