by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Francisco Garcia has risen to greater heights than perhaps any other posterer in this city.

And he’s done it with the help of a Haitian guy with a van and a ladder.

In the last year Garcia has—with the help of his handy assistant—ascended those rungs to plaster his artwork around town on surfaces well above traditional eye-level.

But when he rubs the sleep from his eyes in the morning he’s a regular paper-pusher, in the office sense. Garcia is one of the city’s few postering bureaucrats, managing a recently installed series of metal kiosks on Ste-Catherine (at Bleury, Clark and Sanguinet), which hosts posters for cultural events.

From both his higher vantage points as an artist and his grounded view as an official, Garcia sees that the politics of postering in Montreal is unfairly stacked against the little guy.

According to Article 565 of the urban planning bylaw CU-1, posters are only allowed on hoardings (temporary board fences around construction sites), unless the owner prohibits it with a sign.

Those plywood walls are dominated by Publicité Sauvage and its team of 12 über-efficient posterers. Those that can’t afford to hire the company often end up putting their posters in illegal places and suffering fines for their troubles.

Violating the code

Garcia feels that Publicité Sauvage violates an unspoken code by not being down with other people’s posters. “On the smaller scale, people try to give each other space,” he says. “You don’t cover other posters until the dates of those events are past. But Publicité Sauvage monopolizes the construction walls. They don’t share them. If you go and try to use a small area of those walls for a poster, they’ll consider it a good reason to use more of their clients’ posters and they’ll cover yours up. They feel they can dominate these walls and as a result the smaller people have to stick to illegal alternatives—mailboxes, private walls, posts.”

But Publicité Sauvage considers itself a postering pioneer, and contends that they are to thank for making such advertising partially legal. “In the 1990s, Publicité Sauvage lobbied the city to scrap the bylaw making postering illegal on all surfaces,” says Isabelle Jalbert, the company’s marketing and sales manager. “The city finally compromised and made it legal, but only around construction sites.”

Garcia would like Publicité Sauvage to leave a token area, perhaps 10 per cent of the construction walls, to allow smaller venues to put up their notices.

Jalbert rejects the suggestion and has no apologies for hoarding the plywood. “We have clients who pay us to give them visibility.”

She sees rival posterers as future clients. “We know they don’t all have the money to hire us, but we’re not here to jam a stick in the spokes of smaller groups,” she says. “In many cases they’re our next generation of clients.”

Threats to all posters loom

Jalbert says all posterers should be preoccupied with a universal threat: the increasing disappearance of plywood walls. Construction sites are increasingly surrounded by metal fences, which are impossible to poster upon, she laments.

Garcia’s work is another partial solution. The pilot project Garcia manages for the Table de concertation du Faubourg St-Laurent, a community resource network, allows venues to legally post their notices by e-mailing him their document, which he prints in black and white and slaps on one of the new kiosks. Another eventual public listings concept proposed by the Quartier des spectacles—a downtown-based non-profit cultural organization—would see a massive electronic listings sign erected at the Main and Ste-Catherine.

Garcia’s own personal high-altitude public art exhibits are technically no more legal than that which others get fined for, but so far nobody has complained. Over the past year, Garcia has glued eight of his larger pieces on walls above eye-level. He recently glued a large facial portrait of a staffer from Mile-End’s Café Olimpico (aka Open da Night) on the blank signage space of a bookstore directly across the street. The owner of the bookstore where Garcia imposed his art was pleasantly surprised, and the café is also happy. He chose the shyest café staffer as his initial subject but he plans to eventually portray all of them. “It was great laughs all around,” he says. “I couldn’t stop laughing, and the workers couldn’t stop laughing.”