Páginas Amarillas brings together full color and yellow-tone photographs by Salvadoran artist Mano Penalva, taken while visiting Mexico City. The subject of Penalva’s work are the yellow tarpaulins used to created stalls in the tianguis—open-air markets—of Sonora and La Merced. In his included Spanish-language essay, “Modos de leer o contar lo que se lee de la ciudad,” Brazilian curator and critic Maykson Cardoso identifies Penalva’s photographs as drawing on the tradition of the flâneur—one who walks through urban space as an observer, but blends into the fabric of the city so adeptly that they themselves go unnoticed.
Through Penalva’s focus on the object of the yellow tarpaulin, the artist’s overarching interest in the character of objects is revealed, allowing, in the case of Páginas Amarillas, for the creation of dialogue surrounding commercial spaces such as those of the Sonora and La Merced markets, which, as Cardoso remarks, encapsulate the experience of historically commercial space—dating to the pre-Hispanic period—those of the workers who run and regulate the markets and their stalls, and the nature of legal and illegal trade in both its political and aesthetic manifestations.