Sensacional! Mexican Street Graphics
Until September 16; Glasgow School of Art

“Sensacional! is the exhibitionary antidote to ever encroaching bland corporate international marketing”, says the blurb for the current exhibition at Glasgow School of Art. A hand painted introductory text dangles over the entrance, promising something a bit different from the usual crisp vinyl lettering of exhibition design.

The show packs a funfair of brash colours and plastics into Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s tasteful wood interior, celebrating the unrestrained art of Mexican sign writers. The “rotulistas”, many of them untrained, brighten the streets of Mexico with their shop signs and advertisements.

Some are big, brassy, well-honed pieces of design. Most are just big and brassy. Vacuum cleaners grin widely, and roast chickens wiggle their hips. Worn out boots sag on hospital stretchers, while repaired shoes sparkle and fly. Car parts are depicted in great detail – for those who know what kind of car part they need to buy – and masked adventurers sup coffee with heroic aplomb.

Styles vary widely, squeezing 100 years of stylistic difference into the here and now. Cartooning styles of the 1930s rub shoulders with the 1950s pulp magazine look. Honky tonk posters share space with 1980s fashion. All the rules of typography are broken, if they were ever recognised in the first place. Anything goes, as long as the message comes over loud and clear.

For all the jollity of these unfettered images, where notions of “good” and “bad” art do not apply, there is a serious contradiction at the heart of this exhibition. Its curators insist upon the deeply authentic nature of Mexican street signs, whose intimacy is born of imperfection. These signs, they say, mean more to us than globalised design, homogenous and perfect in every way.

The problem is this: most of the images in this show could not be lifted from their original sites, on stone walls and corrugated shutters. A variety of means has been used to reproduce them, many being repainted especially for the exhibition by four rotulistas.

The result is an impressive bank of 39 identically-shaped wooden panels on one wall, and another symmetrical bank of canvasses on another. The images have been removed from their contexts – and their texts – and homogenised for the purpose of this exhibition. In translation, a footballer loses his muscles and a hoover loses its gritty metallic sheen. Individual painting styles are lost in the search for pithy presentation.

The spontaneity and difference which inspired this show are gone, beaten yet again by the tyranny of the neat and tidy.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 11.09.05