Jack the Pelican is pleased to present “Just Cause It’s Legal Doesn’t Make It Right.”—Michael Genovese paints out the message in Spanish, Polish and Hebrew (the ethnic languages of this area) with great exuberance across the back wall of the gallery. It’s a grand, festive sign, zesty with decorative flourishes, like something you once saw painted on the window of a Rochester diner or an LA street vendor’s cart. —A little bit of ethnic spice, maybe a whiff of nostalgia, earnestness instead of irony… But the resemblance ends there. This is the mother of all signs. A masterfully executed, conceptually and politically loaded firebomb of understatement.

Genovese says, “I am a sign painter.” He wants to keep it real. Two years ago, he set up as an itinerant sign painter in his native Chicago to hand-letter traditional signs for ice cream and fruit vendors and scrap metal trucks. But it’s not really a job. He doesn’t get paid. “OK, a text-based artist.” He’s grinning. He never went the art school route, but he’s savvier than most MFAs. This street project-ongoing-he calls ” Lo que puedes pagar (For what you can afford).” It makes people really nervous, he notes, that he offers to do it for almost nothing-a bag of fruit!-as though he were a con man or a subversive. It is subversive, just to help them. They’re proud. They’re not looking for handouts. But they warm up to it. Just this week, he got a job in a bodega on South 4th and Driggs in Williamsburg—it’ll be a big “DULCE” sign over the candy counter, all for a sandwich and a cup of coffee. Yes, it’s part of the exhibition (maps available), in addition to another sign on the gallery’s exterior, celebrating his show and also Tom Bogaert’s (running concurrently).*

Hand-painted signs are a world apart from the printed vinyls cluttering so many city streets. They have character, like human voices. We’ve seen vintage sign painting styles graphically rejuvenated in the beautiful work of Steve Powers and Margaret Kilgallen. And others, have brought the gritty street into their work by contracting authentic tradesmen to paint signs for them. Genovese is unique in painting within the living language of the sign painting tradition. There is no ironic pop distance separating him from his craft. His project is transactional in the real world. He champions simple mom-and-pop street commerce by painting nice signs for those who can’t afford them. Rather than add a veneer of charm, they communicate in concrete terms what is for sale and, for his clients, the consequences are real and immediate. When he brings the craft into the rarified interior space of the art world, he likewise addresses the situation at hand. It’s not just a sign. It’s a sign talking to you in the here and now.

What many people don’t realize is that traditional sign painting is a living language, with ethnic and regional codes much like graffiti. Most sign painters work within a single set of conventions. For Genovese, by contrast, sign painting is always a spontaneous, on-the-spot performance. No computer with cookie cutter fonts. No projection. After scouring the streets and digging through garbage for “visual data” that will help him nail a particular vernacular, he just goes at it. Mainly, he works in the Quick Lettering tradition, in which the painter calligraphically performs each letter. As in graffiti tagging, the life of the line is at issue. And the art has had its great masters—although, as “legal” artists working in the commercial context, they are relegated to the status of tradesmen, known mainly to those in the industry.

On one level, “Just Cause It’s Legal Doesn’t Make It Right” addresses the people. We hold this fact to be self-evident. The motto also speaks up with “You won’t get away with it” indignation to the bureaucracies that make life miserable for the people by acting against us with sneaky obfuscations we don’t understand. Just one example—it is the summons or the eviction notice that we can’t read and couldn’t read even if it were printed legibly, which it is not. As in , get a lawyer. If you cannot afford one, get fucked. This speaks to the situation in Williamsburg, as local populations find themselves helpless against the landlords and developers in fancy suits who politely (and legally) seek to displace them. It is an old story, banality of evil and all that, hypocrisy…

On another level, it speaks to Genovese’s anxieties about street art being imported into galleries. For Genovese, it’s always been the street. Growing up in the projects in Chicago’s NW Side, when he was a graffiti artist, it was about getting his mark up on the wall so people would see it. Now, as a sign painter, he takes pride in doing a good job, but it’s not about Genovese. No ego. His clients’ needs come first. For Genovese, this is a politically conscious act. The graffiti tradition that emerged in New York was inherently lawless. That was its power. That was its message. Contemporary domestic varieties inherit their edge from the aesthetic of having once been literally against the law. But now, they are legal. And that doesn’t make them right.

Genovese continues to think a lot about the problematics and potential of graffiti-particularly Chicago gang style (as opposed to the more aestheticized NYC hip hop variety); but, for the most part, he gave up the practice when he left Chicago in his late teens to join the carnival-down the Southern circuit through Missouri, Alabama and Georgia. It was in the carnival that he learned the rudiments of his sign painting craft. (You get more customers with better signs.) Later, he got a job as a sign consultant, advising corporate clients on how to make signage work for them. And, eventually, he went on to become his own boss with a company doing giant corporate logos on the bottoms of swimming pools. “It’s hard to feel connected to,” he notes.

Then, as the kids from his graffiti days started exhibiting in galleries, he got the art bug. He liked being creative. He wanted to say something real. It was in 2002, after collaborating with Guillermo Gomez Pena for “The Brown Sheep Project” at Chicago’s Glass Curtain Gallery that he got serious. Pena opened his eyes to the powerful connection between art and life. For Genovese, that is the nut—being about something, being real, being transactional, being interactive, balls to the wall. Not just image and ego. Real life. Real people. Sign painter, yes. It’s his story and he’s sticking to it.

This is Michael Genovese’s first one-person show in New York. For two months, beginning two days after his show opens at Jack the Pelican, Genovese’s studio practice will be on view at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. He is the pioneer of a new artist-in-residency project that puts the living artist studio on display. A live webcast will allow viewers to see him in action.