Fileteado Porteño vs Ghost Signs
フィレテアード・ポルテーニョ / ゴーストサイン
Both sit in Signage and Display, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. One is technique and the other style. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Fileteado Porteño
Buenos Aires's decorative linework grew out of cart painting and shop signs. Swirling acanthus, ribbons, flowers and heavily shaded letters work as a single system in this urban brush craft, now inscribed by UNESCO.
Ghost Signs
Hand-painted brick-wall advertisements faded by weather. The lettering of the craftsmen called wall dogs, through peeling and fading, is being rediscovered as a stratum of urban memory.
| Fileteado Porteño | Ghost Signs | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1900s– | 1880s–1950s / rediscovery |
| Family | Signage and Display | Signage and Display |
| Kind | Technique | Style |
| Cues | Swirling acanthus and ribbons / Heavily shaded ornamental letters / Symmetrical framing / Traditional blue, gold and red | Paint applied straight to brick / Fading and peeling / Craftsman lettering / Layers of overpainting |
| Best used for | Signs and lettering where the shop or vehicle name is drawn into the ornament · Festive notices and restaurant walls that raise a neighborhood's pride | Treating the traces on an existing wall as design in a renovation · Painting a new sign on an old building with the texture of accumulated time |
| Type | Letters given solid shading and white highlights, drawn with the ornament brush | Redraw period shop lettering by hand, with shadowed letters and ornament rules |
| Composition | Frames built symmetrically about a center line, corners closed by scrolls | Do not dodge joints or openings, aligning letters to the brick coursing |
| Material | Enamel pulled with a single brush, gold lines over blue and red | Brushed straight onto brick, assuming the least stable colors fade first |
| Caution | Pasting scrollwork from a clip library never gives the tension of a pulled brushline, and the letters end up floating apart from the ornament. | Applying an even wash of distress falsifies the direction of fading and the order of overpainting, and the intended age reads as fake. |