Europe

Francis Alÿs

Boat with Legs

2007

Boat with Legs, 2007

Boat with Legs by Francis Alÿs is part of a series of small drawings that provide an intimate glimpse into the artist’s conceptual process. Executed with a variety of materials—pen, ink, colored pencil, charcoal, and masking tape—on architect’s tracing paper, the piece reflects Alÿs’s exploratory approach to art-making. This drawing, featuring a yellow boat improbably equipped with legs, blends whimsy with a deeper commentary on mobility and transformation. The use of architect’s tracing paper underscores the idea of construction and planning, suggesting the drawing as a blueprint for larger performances, videos, or two-dimensional works. Alÿs’s choice of mixed media adds layers of texture and dynamism, capturing the fluidity of his thoughts at the raw conceptual stage. This drawing not only reveals the artist’s imaginative vision but also serves as a foundational piece that enhances our understanding of his broader oeuvre, highlighting his engagement with themes of absurdity and the intersection of the ordinary and the fantastical.

Trained as an architect, Francis Alÿs turned to a visual arts-based practice in the early 1990s as a more immediate, direct, and effective way of exploring issues related to urbanization, to the ordering and significance of urban space and to the semiotics of its use. His work initiates with a simple action, either executed by him or others, which is then documented in a range of media. Alÿs explores subjects such as modernizing programs in Latin America and border zones in areas of conflict, often asking about the relevance of poetic acts in politicized situations. Documentation is central to his practice as well as painting, drawing, and video. In his work, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002) made in collaboration with Mexican critic Cuauhtemoc Medina, Alÿs recruited 500 volunteers outside of Lima, Peru. Each person moved a shovel full of sand one step at a time from one side of a dune to the other, and together they moved the entire geographical location of the dune by a few inches. Critic Jean Fisher linked Alÿs’s work to the radical event of precipitating a crisis of meaning, where the exposure of a void of meaning is confronted by its social situation, leading up to some kind of truth.

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Francis Alÿs Boat with Legs

Francis Alÿs

Boat with Legs