Even the most jaded of Gothamist staffers has been swayed at one point by the twists and turns of Cupid's arrow. Who are we to say people can't fall in love with mannequins or the Statue of Liberty? Or that romance can't be found in an IKEA or at Port Authority? So we are willing to believe that artist Maria Luisa Portuondo Vila is sincere when she says she put up her "Missing Love" subway posters because she truly wants to find the be-hatted man of her dreams: "Yes I will be really happy if I find him," she told us by email. "I just want give him the drawing that I had for him."
Vila, a 30-year-old installation and performance artist from Chile who moved to the city five months ago, says she ran into the mysterious man in November. "I saw this boy in the subway and he was really beautiful," she told us. "I wanted give him a drawing with my mail and web page but when I [got] close to him a lot of people [were] getting into the wagon and I lost him." She said she was frustrated that she didn't pounce on the man as he was sneezing: "It was my moment!!!"
Villa, who says she currently "works with brands like Converse" on projects, had an artist do a sketch of the man, and printed up 300 posters with his description with the help of designer Andy Dockett. She said it was a coincidence that she started putting them up a week before Valentine's Day, and her friends have been on her case about the project: "I have a lot of friends who tell me you’re crazy [and] that this is weird. Poor man!” she told WPIX. "But I’m like no, this is not crazy—it’s romantic."
Of course, it's not so romantic when a person scrawls manifestos to their lost loves, but context is key here. We asked her why she was promoting the project on Facebook as an "art action" if this isn't just a way of drumming up publicity for her brand: "When I talk under the action art concept I want to say: this is an action, a verb, a artistic event. But behind personal and artistic reasons."
So we want to believe she's sincere, and not that everything uplifting on the Internet is the product of some hoax concocted in somebody's lonely basement or lonely viral marketing conference room. Of course, the joke is probably on all of us, since her lost love was already located by Tim Burton nine years-ago:
