Signs of the times

"Sensacional! Mexican Street Graphics," a superficially vibrant exhibition at the Massachusetts College of Art + Design, promises a taste of authentic regional visual cuisine. Too much of what it delivers, unfortunately, is a denatured and puffed-up imitation of the real thing.

The exhibition began life in 2001 as a book of photographs: color pictures of vernacular commercial wall paintings, signs, and posters advertising products, services, and entertainment in urban areas of Mexico. Impressed by the graphic vitality of this material - which typically is produced by anonymous artisans who have had no formal training in art or design - editors Juan Carlos Mena and Oscar Reyes at Trilce Ediciones of Mexico City, the book's publisher, teamed up with the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, to create a traveling exhibition. The show debuted in 2003 at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Calif.

Along with many photographs of wall paintings, the exhibition organizers included actual signs, posters, and other materials printed on paper and cardboard. And to further represent nonportable wall paintings, they hired a team of Mexican sign painters to create simulations of actual signs. Made on canvas, wood panels designed to resemble construction fencing, and rectangles of corrugated plastic, these paintings replicate ads for food stands, auto-parts stores, locksmiths, barber shops, and other businesses. The copies represent the show's most visually assertive dimension, and because they are simulations, they are its biggest problem.

Confusingly, the exhibit includes machine-printed signs that look unlike commercial street graphics. There are 1970s-style cartoon posters advising better work habits in factories and offices, illustrations fostering sex and drug awareness, and enlarged copies of pulp-fiction paperback and comic-book covers featuring busty women.

Wall paintings, however - whether represented in photographs or in freshly made copies - remain the show's main attraction. The appeal of the wall paintings is partly formal: The Mexican sign painters create immediate visual impact by using vivid colors and bold cartoon outlines and by eliminating unnecessary information. Pictures of a wristwatch and a typewriter rendered in glossy paint on squares of white, corrugated plastic are marvels of graphic economy and idiosyncratic charm. So are many other images of objects painted on various surfaces: keys, tools, tires, automobile engine parts, and small appliances such as fans and blenders.

Pop Art has prepared us to appreciate this kind of urban folk design. No doubt, Andy Warhol would enjoy large canvas banners bearing images of lucha libre wrestling masks and people modeling various haircut styles organized into gridded compositions.

Some paintings depict wacky surrealistic fantasies involving anthropomorphized food products. One of the canvas simulations portrays a grinning hamburger with legs, eyes, and a meat patty that's morphed into a giant, lolling tongue. A poultry seller's sign depicts a yellow rooster in blue jeans preparing to execute a little white chicken with a butcher knife.

One series of photographs captures wall paintings representing figures from globalized entertainment culture such as R2-D2 from "Star Wars," a gremlin from "Gremlins," and pop star Michael Jackson. While these and other famous characters are recognizable, they're depicted in such distorted ways that it seems as if they've been transformed into mythic beings of a local folk culture.

For North American city dwellers inhabiting a world of mass-produced, machine-made objects and signs, there is much exotic appeal in commercial signs painted by hand directly on building walls - signs that bear the idiosyncratic character of their makers' unperfected skills and that are richly textured by the surfaces they're painted on and the natural effects of outdoor elements. The names of the Mexican street painters may not be known, but their works are not anonymous the way signs in modern North America are.

Because they don't adhere to conventional rules of perspective or proportion, many of the signs have a childlike quality. They seem to embody a psychological honesty that is all-too-rarely encountered in a modern culture shaped by the cookie-cutter effects of industrialism, bureaucracy, and consumerism.

So there is something troublingly paradoxical in the idea of hiring sign painters to simulate real signs. It makes a certain sense - who is better equipped to produce faithful versions of Mexican vernacular signage than artists who do that kind of work? And yet, under the circumstances, the copies convey the opposite of the authenticity they are supposed to represent. They look displaced, fake, and soulless, like a form of tourist art. When graffiti artists began producing works on canvas for sale in high-end art galleries in the 1980s, the effect was similarly dispiriting.

This show could be a great walk-in sourcebook of quirky images and styles for MassArt's art and design students. Visitors wishing for more of the real thing might consider booking a trip to Mexico City, where wall painting lives on in all its funky, unpretentious, and soulful glory.