Days of Clear Blue Skies — María Tinaut

Commercial bill posters in the subway in Valencia, Spain are temporarily covered in blue immediately before they are changed. This blue color is simply the backside of the paper they use to print advertisements; when they are not advertising anything, they just flip them and put them face in. Yet beyond its functionality, this blue acts as a visual gap or temporary break, following a divergent logic from the ways in which billboards normally function. This absence of an image within the very solid steel frame is very poetic and always reminds me of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ snapshots of the sky.

Right after the 2019 Christmas campaign, I decided to pay homage to him and his work, taking advantage of a temporarily “empty” billboard. Scanning his handwriting on the back of one of his photos, which read Days of Clear Skies, I rescaled it, printed it in vinyl, and installed on a billboard located by the entrance of the Plaza España subway stop in downtown Valencia. This intervention in the subway’s billboard became a record of the physical movements of some passers-by in the following weeks. The images above show its state on day one, a pristine blue that worked as a kind of skylight for the public’s imaginations. After 3 weeks, the image registered all kinds of human activities: spits, scuffs, tags, and paper tears. Finally, it was covered with some fast food company’s advertisement.