While on a trip to Southern Turkey last year I was taken on a tour of secret cave churches from the Byzantine era. Inside were spectacular frescoes of Jesus, Mary, and the apostles. Even though parts of them had faded into oblivion the overall effect was stunning–like the curtain of history has been pulled back. If you walk around New York, amateur archeologists will discover the urban, secular equivalent–hand-painted ads on buildings publicizing long-departed tailors and accountants or eccentric products like Fig Syrup from a time when the city had telephone exchanges with names like Butterfield and Algonquin instead of numerical area codes.

As these 20th century murals faded into the brickwork or got covered up by new construction, a curious thing happened. Like fedoras and vinyl, wall ads have returned for a generation who were born long after their heyday. As I stroll around fashionable parts of Manhattan or Brooklyn I now see freshly painted walls promoting Comedy Central, video games and bourbon. My gaze, which is conditioned to ignore mechanically-reproduced billboards, is now fixated on something done by hand with such painstaking care and skill.

The resurgence of hand-painted signs and wall advertisements is part of a larger (welcome) return of natural and tactile elements after a saturation of the processed and plastic. Everything from food prepared the old fashioned way to jazz-age-style baseball stadiums laid with brick instead of poured with concrete.

Sometime in the 1990s (around the time retro-loving Swingers was a hit) a generation weaned on ColecoVision and Casio watches realized that technology couldn’t solve all our problems. Steve Jobs saved us from a future the color of beige but what about the rest of the culture? After decades of gutting old spaces and scraping off peeling paint people realized that oil and enamel on glass or brick had the elegance of a pocket square and that plastic signs were for fast-food restaurants and banks. Wall ads are the next logical step.

The new/old medium-situated somewhere between graffiti and frescoes-brings us full circle to a pre-electronic age before ad saturation. Now we’re headed towards a post-electronic age. Once the ads didn’t exist, now they’re becoming invisible. As electronic and print ads drift into irrelevancy the urban environment is a last bastion throwback option for marketers. A walk through New York’s streets reveals a curious kind of visual narrative which begins in the first half of the 20th Century then is silenced around 1970 or so, only to be resurrected a generation later-the ads an unlikely offspring of the ghostly apparitions etched in brick and stone.

Critical Mob