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LEÓN FERRARI |
I draw silent handwritten words, which tell things, with lines that recall voices. And I write drawings that recite memories that words cannot say. I am very much interested in the attitude of the person who looks at a written drawing: he has within him traces of the millenary human history of looking at rationally comprehensible writing, of constructing meaning or piecing together an image as his eyes go over the lines of writing.
1920-1954 León was sent to Catholic schools run by priests where he recalled “the notion of hell was stuffed into your head […] That image generated a terrible fear in the mind of the child. And fear winds up controlling your whole life.” (Juan Ignacio Boido, Rojo y Negro, Página /30, July 1999, revised in June 2004) “As a child, Ferrari resented daily exposure to Christian imagery and weekly coercive indoctrination. All these early experiences explain his lifelong attraction and repulsion by the Church as a source of faith and as an institution of power.” (Héctor Olea in Inverted Utopias, MFAH, 2004) He studied engineering at the Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Física y Naturales of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, and after graduating in 1947, he worked with his father on several construction projects in Córdoba. In 1946 León married Alicia Barros Castro. Moved to Rosario where he worked for Celulosa de Argentina, a paper manufacturer. In 1950 the family returned to Buenos Aires. They settled in Castelar, a suburb 20 km. from Buenos Aires, in a house built by his father where León set up his workshop in the garage. Daughter Marialí was born in 1948, son Pablo in 1949, and Ariel in 1951. 1952 1953 1954
In June he sent several pieces to the national ceramics competition at the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche di Faenza. Ferrari participated in the X Milan Triennial, where he met Lucio Fontana, a juror. 1955 Ferrari returned to Buenos Aires, researched ceramic pigments, and then set up a small company to produce metal compounds, a business that he continued until 1976. 1958-1959 In 1959 Ferrari returned to making sculpture in cement, plaster and wood. 1960
He met the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, an émigré after the defeat of the Republican Government who had arrived in Argentina in 1940. They collaborated in the production of a book of poems and drawings, Escrito en el aire [Written in the Air] published in Milan in 1964 by Vanni Scheiwiller, Al Insegna del Pesce d’Oro.
1961
“When somebody makes sculptures and drawings it is assumed that the drawings were made first, and then transferred to sculpture. On the contrary,” Ferrari says, “I began to make wire sculptures, and the drawings were done two years later in Italy, when Arturo Schwarz invited me to participate in a collection of prints.” In December 1961 Ferrari traveled to Milan where he stayed four months. 1962
It was then that he began his remarkable abstract drawings. “This may well be the year’s most interesting work, since I began drawing ‘Music,’” Ferrari wrote, evaluating his year’s activity on December 31, 1962. Lyle Rexer wrote: “The point of the ‘Music’ pieces seems to be that while conventional notation contains the promise of sound, another kind of rendering might convey the experience of music, its rhythms and intensities, as heard. Ferrari doesn't estheticize the characters of a language, turning them into mysterious and beautiful symbols, as did Klee. Rather, he calls attention to ways in which musical notation and written language suggest, convey and withhold meaning.” (Art in America, April 2005, exhibition at the Drawing Center in New York León Ferrari: Politiscripts) Six of his remarkable drawings from 1962 and 1964 are in the MoMA collection. During his stay in Milan he met the art critics Giulio Carlo Argan and Gillo Dorfles, and established a connection with the Levi Gallery. He also went to Paris, visited Le Point Cardinal gallery, where he consigned a collection of drawings. In April Ferrari returned to Buenos Aires. In September, he showed wire sculptures and drawings in the Galería Antigona in Buenos Aires. The Buenos Aires Museo de Arte Moderno acquired Hombre [Man] 1962, a large wire sculpture (77 x 27½ x 27 in., 196 x 70 x 69 cm.).
1963 On the Letter to a General Ferrari commented: “It is difficult to write a ‘logical’ letter to a general. A letter that says something, that is not just an insult, but is ‘artistic.’ In the incomprehensible nature of these letters - more than a form of protection against censorship is a confession of my incapability to write a letter like Rodolfo Walsh’s. Now that was a letter. What I wrote was an imitation of a letter, or a hidden letter, that could make you ask: does this mean something or it doesn’t? (Rodolfo Walsh wrote “Carta abierta de un escritor a la Junta Militar” [Open letter from a writer to the Military Junta] on March 24, 1977 the first anniversary of the dictatorship. The following day Walsh was kidnapped and killed by the ESMA [Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada] task force.)
Ferrari began work on Torre de Babel [Tower of Babel] a large-scale piece (86½ tall x 33½ inches in diameter, 220 x 85 cm.) made of variegated metal plates and twisted wires. With this sculpture, the idea of “Babelism” arose as a group art project, involving other Argentine artists. This was the last wire sculpture Ferrari made in the Sixties.
In September he traveled to São Paulo. Ferrari made his first glass-fronted boxes that he filled with hair, wire, drawings, and photograph clippings. Reflexiones, now in the collection of MoMA New York, has an all-over written glass front and is filled with painted fine wire.
1964
He began a series of written drawings, of which El árbol embarazador [The Impregnating Tree] is the first to openly criticize Christianity. Ferrari explained: “In the middle of a drawing-manuscript I placed an illustration of Michelangelo’s David’s penis. What I wrote in my text was a sort of rereading of the Flood ... The women saved themselves by inflating their breasts and buttocks in order to float. All the men died, but Satan rescued the penis from each one of them and grafted them onto a giant tree: the Impregnating Tree. The women climbed it: the sinners, in one great group fornication. (Alberto Collazo, Vidella cumple con la Biblia, “Fin de Siglo № 11,” Bs As, May 1988)
Two drawings: “Musica” and “Letter to a General” were included in the exhibition Schrift und Bild, at the Stedellijk Museum in Amsterdam, and at the Künsthalle in Baden-Baden. The exhibition, an important survey of the uses of writing as an element in modern art, included works by Pollock, Klee, Michaux, Torres-García, Cy Twombly, Dubuffet, Miró, Tobey, Japanese calligraphy, etc. Ferrari’s “Musica” was reproduced on page 118 of the catalogue with Jackson Pollock’s “Drawing.” In December Ferrari finished Cuadro escrito [Written Painting]. Ferrari explained that what motivated him to write it was “that certain paintings are criticized for being too literal, a result of the criticized feature taken to an extreme. They are purely literary works; written visual art. But they can be considered as visual art because the image is preserved. It is transferred from hanging on the wall in front of the viewers’ eye, to behind his pupils, to his imagination, fired by the words that make up the image.” (León Ferrari, Ecología bíblica, in “Eco: la última palabra,” Palais de Glace, 1996 exhibition catalogue) According to Héctor Olea, the Written Painting is “a ground-breaking work that not only consolidated his [Ferrari’s] approach to visual art and poetry but also emerged as a paradigm of his innovative talent.” Luis Camnitzer pointed out that it predates comparable projects by Joseph Kosuth. As Mari Carmen Ramírez explained, “León Ferrari’s suspension of the distinction between the acts of ‘seeing’ and ‘reading’ a work, as exemplified by this series, not only preceded the xerographic tautologies of Joseph Kosuth, but already differentiated both versions of language-based art.” (Mari Carmen Ramírez, Cantos Paralelos, Blanton Museum, Austin, 1999) The critic Hugo Parpagnoli organized an exhibition for the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires titled Objetos [Objects]. Ferrari showed a dozen bottles in a crate stuffed with wire, fabric, paper cutouts, and with amorphous and at times unpleasant materials. (Andrea Giunta, Disturbing Beauty, Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2004) 1965 According to Ferrari: “Romero Brest invited me to the ’65 Prize exhibition supposing (I believe) that I would send either a wire sculpture […] or something similar. When I changed my mind about art, motivated by the bombings in Vietnam, I warned him that I would do something else. When he saw the airplane mounted, some two or three days prior to the opening, I noticed that he was worried; he called me to his office and said that he could not show the work because, among other reasons, it would hurt the religious feelings of the staff, or some of the staff. He suggested that I replace the plane with the model or with another piece, or leave only the three boxes that completed my participation […] what was clear was that the plane would not be exhibited, that wasn’t negotiable […] I found myself in a kind of dilemma: either take the route of the visual arts, that indicates or demanded withdrawing everything and denouncing the censorship, or the political route [that is to say] my initial purpose in showing something about Vietnam precisely there, in the place of those liberties that the US bombers were proclaiming. (Letter from the artist to Andrea Giunta, 7 August 1993, LF Archive)
The boxes provoked a strong reaction from Ernesto Ramallo, art critic at La Prensa: León Ferrari answered in a letter published in the magazine Propósitos (September 21, 1965). “I don’t know if my pieces have any formal value. The only thing I ask of art is to aid me in expressing myself as clearly as possible, to invent plastic and critical signs that with utmost efficacy will condemn the barbarian Western civilization. Maybe somebody will show me that this is not art; I would have no problem with that, I would not change, I would call it by a different name; I would cross out art and call it politics, acerbic critic, anything.” From that time onward, writing letters to the press allowed Ferrari to intervene and establish his position on issues connected to aesthetics or politics in public debates. (Published in León Ferrari, Prosa Política, Siglo Veintiuno, Buenos Aires, 2005, edited by Andrea Giunta) After the Di Tella scandal, Ferrari began working on Palabras ajenas (Other People’s Words), where he developed an imaginary dialogue between 170 characters, among them: Hitler, President Lyndon Johnson, Pope Paul VI, Goering, God, news agencies, etc. It is a literary collage that condenses the history of violence in the West from its origins up to the present day taken from published texts in newspapers, magazines and books. For Héctor Olea, in Other People’s Words, Ferrari “excavated the most diverse strata of historic phraseology hinting that the artist is nothing but a mere manipulator of meaning conveyed through texts and images.”
Ferrari conceived these texts as a book to be also presented theatrically. “The piece will last for at least 10 hours, new pages will be published to complete this time, it will have neither beginning nor end, the spectator will arrive when it has already started and will leave when tired, and they will be charged by the hour. Ferrari indicated that the text’s objective was to show an idea about the contemporary world: “…the encounter in the world between those who call themselves the West and the so-called Third World […] What perhaps moved me to start this text was the daily publication of testimonies and photos of torture in the press. Not because of the torture in and of itself, but -above all- for the fact that the West shows itself, for the first time, coldly in action. (LF in La Opinión, 30 November, 1972) 1967 In a letter that Julio Cortázar wrote León: “The evening before my trip I received Palabras ajenas by air mail, and that night I read the first thirty pages […] they give a clear idea of the mechanism of your piece, and allow me to agree with you that merely reading it is cumbersome, as it lacks theatrical effects and I suppose, all the vigor that light and accents would give it. But it is a very good idea, and it seems to me that this kind of tremendous oratory (the word turns out to be ironic, but no other occurs to me) could have a very profound effect on any audience in the world.” (JC to LF, 2 July 1967, LF Archive) In December, Ferrari sent a copy of Palabras ajenas to his friend, the Argentine conceptual artist Leopoldo Mahler, telling him that he was preparing a theatrical version. Mahler, who at that moment worked for the BBC in London, proposed mounting it for the stage. Earlier in May, an exhibition organized by the Di Tella Institute Experiencias 1968, touched off protests by artists who publicly confronting art-institutional censorship by the police, destroyed their own works in remonstration. Artists and intellectuals in Argentina organized meetings to discuss the place that art and culture had in society. At an August meeting in the city of Rosario, Ferrari presented the essay El arte de los significados (The Art of Meanings). He was increasingly preoccupied with the idea that avant-garde art has no ideology or meaning other than purely formal, and is for the social and cultural elite. In El arte de los significados, he proposed that meaningful contemporary art include political engagement, “Art will be neither beauty nor novelty; art will be efficacy and perturbation.” Ferrari became a prominent member of a group of artists and activists who created “Tucumán Arde,” a ground-breaking exhibition denouncing the exploitation of the sugar cane workers in Tucumán province. These artists were preoccupied with the fundamental connection between the apparently disparate spheres of the experimental and the political. Héctor Olea wrote: “At stake was the nexus between art’s politics and the potential risk of sacrificing this quality in order to support formal experimentation. Among other things, this activist group proposed that committed art should resist becoming propaganda. The idea that art could be at once formally innovative and politically engaged annihilated all the common places about political art mired in the gross parameters of Social Realism or the ancillary policies of some party. For Tucumán Arde, ideology -defined as simply a systematic body of concepts- is immanent not only to political art but to art in general.”
1969 1971 In the II Certamen Nacional de Experiencias Visuales, linked to the Salón Nacional, Ferrari proposed to post El calendario de la Casa Rosada [The Pink House Calendar] a mural calendar with daily updates of the repression in Argentina posted on it - the jury rejected the project. 1972 In October at the Salón Independiente [Independent Salon], organized as a protest against increasing censorship and repression in Argentina, Ferrari presented a reproduction of an article published in Le Monde on September 19, about the shootings in Trelew, including declarations by survivors. He also showed a collage of newspaper clipping, texts and photographs in collaboration with Ricardo Carpani, Luis Felipe Noé, Oscar Smoje, Eduardo Rodriguez and Alicia Benitez. Hugo Monzón in La Opinión, 11 October, wrote: “that the epilogue to the history of this significant testimony the artists presented had yet to be written.” 1973-1976 In 1975 he returned to drawing after almost a decade. During these years he participated in the Foro por los Derechos Humanos (Forum for Human Rights), and in the Movimiento contra la Represión y la Tortura (Movement against Repression and Torture). 1976 In Brazil, Ferrari mounted the clippings on boards to create 4 editions titled Nosotros no sabíamos [We Didn’t Know]. The phrase, widely used by a sector of society in an attempt to justify its indifference toward the repression carried out by the Argentine State during the years of the dictatorship, dismayed Ferrari. He confronted this excuse by showing that most of the abuses had been reported in the press. 1977-1979 In February at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, he showed drawings, prints, and sculptures including Planeta, newly made of steel and silver solder and 51 inches in diameter. In the catalogue introduction, Aracy Amaral refers to the wire sculpture as linear “galaxies, nuclei suspended in contained spaces, or models of imaginary buildings where light is recognized as having a central role in transfiguring the linear elements.” (Aracy Amaral “León Ferrari na Pinacoteca,” prologue to the exhibition catalogue León Ferrari, Esculturas, Gravuras e Disenhos, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 1978)
About the relation of his wire sculptures and his drawings, Ferrari explained that the relevance of the rectangular shape of the sheet of paper is often overlooked, “Every single page man has written is homage to the rectangle.” The rectangular drawing on a sheet of paper, he adds, can also be repeated in the air and “when projected into space becomes a prism whose faces and edges are the anonymous frame, repeated, impersonal, transparent, envelope within which a line simply has to find its place.” When made of metal rods these sculptures can be ‘played’ as musical instruments.
The motion of the wires in his sculpture either stirred by the wind or by hand, in their wave-like infinite configurations, inspired a series of drawings that depict the wires frozen in different movements, Ferrari titled them Vocabularies. The sounds the sculptures made when stirred were recorded, amplified and then incorporated into a musical composition by Caito Marcondes Nassif for “Tarot,” a dance that the group Quebranto presented at the Pinacoteca. “As soon as I heard those first noises enriched by amplification, I began to investigate and record the sound of my sculptures, and to construct a new series of sculptures now conceived as having a musical function, I called them ‘Percanta,’ a word in Buenos Aires slang that means ‘girl, chick, young woman.’” (LF in Viana, 1980) Ferrari later found out that Harry Bertoia had done something very similar in New York, and he stopped making sculptures with the inverted pendulum principle. “But I continued using them as musical instruments.” (LF, communication with Andrea Giunta, 16 July 2004) He called these sculptures Berimbau, after the Afro-Brazilian single-string folk instrument. Wrote Flasharte I: Berimbau: artefacto para dibujar sonidos [Flasharte I: Berimabau: Artifact for Drawing Sounds]. Flasharte was a form of postal art, Ferrari made three Flash Artes, 200 copies of each which he sent by mail. He made a series of collages using Letraset images titled Ajedrez [Chess], Baños [Bathrooms], and Plantas [Plants]. They were published in Hombres (Ediciones Licopadio, Buenos Aires, 1984) and Imagens (Ediçoes Exú, São Paulo, 1989)
Curator Salina Libman invited Ferrari to participate in the Art lúdica [Playful Art] show in the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, where he presented a 4-meter tall Berimbau sculpture made of 100 vertical rods of different diameters. The public was invited to participate stroking them to make “non figurative music,” as Ferrari called it.
At the Xerox exhibition in São Paulo, Ferrari met a group of artists who were exploring new techniques, among them Mira Schendel, Regina Silveira, Carmela Gross, Marcelo Nitsche, Nelson Leirner, and Julio Plaza. Because of their determination to remain open- minded and to be active despite the censorship imposed by the Brazilian military government, the group had an impact on Ferrari. 1980-1981 Ferrari was intrigued with techniques for reproduction that would make art work available at a low cost. Beginning in 1980, using Letraset symbols designed for architects of doors, toilets, beds, people, cars, etc., he made a series of 27 large-sized designs using a heliographic technique, like blueprints. According to Ferrari they show the absurdity of contemporary life, in an interview with Vicente Zito Lema, he explained: “The result looks like urbanization or plans, with a certain Surrealist humor, and in some way they can also be seen as architecture of madness. I am not guided by an aim to any specific meaning; whoever stands before these works is free to establish associations and to ascribe whatever meaning they consider right - personally, when I see these finished pieces my own interpretation, which neither limits nor excludes others, is that they express the absurdity of current society - that sort of daily madness that is necessary if everything is to look normal.” (Vicente Zito Lema, León Ferrari y los secretos del hombre y la sociedad, “La Voz,” Bs As, July 26, 1984, p.381) “Ferrari used the Letraset system to produce a series of drawings in which he appropriated a code of graphic conventions for architecture and its industrial design presentation. The Syntax of his blueprint series also appears in some of Mira Schendel’s works, in which she manipulates the graphic presence of ready-made letters of the same type. Ferrari draws architectural plans and peoples them with characters that function as indexes of scale. Ironically, the figures that are represented in motion end up in the opposite situation- in freeze-frame. They become prisoners of their own gestures, imprisoned by excess. Their breaking of the rules is cumulative, producing the effect of annulling the information, or of a radical change of meaning. As in one of Goya’s Caprichos, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos [The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters], excessive rationalizing and order produce here an accumulation that annuls all the clarity of language creating a ‘blind knowledge’ of the project, to borrow Ivens Machado’s expression. In the final analysis, León Ferrari’s drawings address the malaise of modernity.” (Paulo Herkenhoff, Autonomous Doodles, Verbal Scrawls and Erasures on Drawing in South America, in Re-aligning Vision, 1997)
Ferrari traveled to Cuba for the Solidarity Congress. He donated a sculpture to the Casa de las Américas. 1982 Participated in the Artemicro (microfiche with support), an event, organized by artist Regina Silveira in the Museu da Imagen e do Som in São Paulo [Museum of Image and Sound]. In the same museum, Ferrari along with ten other artists, experimented with Arte pelo telefone [Art by Telephone], an event that tested sending art through telephone lines to a TV monitor in the form of video text. The event was also presented in Arte e Videotexto at the 17th São Paulo Biennial in 1983.
In June he participated in 14 Nights of Performances playing music with his Percanta sculptures in São Paulo.
In October Prismas e Retângulos [Prisms and Rectangles] opened at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro; and at the Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, Ferrari showed 200 xerographs and blueprint heliographs in Planos, Heliografías y Fotocopias [Blueprints, Heliographies and Photocopies]. 1983 Culture Secretary Fábio Magalhães commissioned Ferrari for a sculpture in homage to the Brazilian essayist, philosopher, literary critic, and champion of intellectual freedom, Alceu Amoroso Lima, who had recently died. The sculpture was titled Uma cathedral aó vento dos dereitos humanos [A Cathedral to the Wind of Human Rights]. It was inaugurated on December 10, Human Rights Day. It is 5.5 meters tall by 4 x 4 meters square and composed of 3-inch diameter rods attached to a base, painted in pastel tones with enough space between the rods for people to walk through it. The sculpture was later dismantled when a highway was built.
Ferrari resumed working with religious themes; he made collages mixing Catholic iconography with erotic oriental and contemporary images. For him, the origin of violence in Western civilization is in the Holy Scriptures. Ferrari is particularly fascinated with ecclesiastical subjects related to punishment, torment, lust and guilt and their relation to certain symbols and signs coming from such unrelated areas as Oriental erotic art, and images of well known art works like Michelangelo’s ceiling and mural in the Sistine Chapel. 1984 1985-1986
He participated in Panorama de formas tridimensionales [Panorama of Three-dimensional Forms] at the MAM in São Paulo; where Ferrari presented for the first time a cage with pigeons whose droppings fell on an image of The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. He showed it again at the XVIII São Paulo Biennial. According to Luis Camnitzer, “...scatology in the visual arts returned with a bang in 1986. Argentinean artist León Ferrari exhibited a cage with two pigeons, whose excretions fell through a stencil of a cross onto a reproduction of Michelangelo’s Final Judgment.” (Art Nexus, 59, Nov 2005) In his essay “Multinationals,” Ferrari wrote that he used paintings that are the pillars of Western culture covered with bird droppings - to criticize the “Christian Multinational, that promotes, sustains, and uses these art works to advertise hell in its most political and evangelical campaign of fear.” León Ferrari, Multinationals, 1986, “Prosa política, Siglo XXI,” Buenos Aires, 2005 In September 1986, Ferrari showed several “Camouflages,” in A nova dimensão do objeto [New Dimensions of the Object], an exhibition at the São Paulo Museum of Contemporary Art. In one, he placed a crucified, camouflage-painted Christ on a background of the same pattern; another was camouflaged in floral wallpaper. He wrapped a Christ and a Sacred Heart with printed images of the Holocaust that he titled “Anti-Semitism.” Published Parahereges, (Expressão, São Paulo). A book where he paired Dürer’s series of engravings: the Apocalypse, the Passion, and the Life of Mary, to erotic images and pagan iconography. 1987 Invited by New York’s Franklin Furnace, Ferrari presented a shrine environment; an installation titled Capilla Hereje [Heretic Chapel], of thirty photographic enlargements of collages from “Re-reading the Bible,” and a cage with two pigeons placed over crosses that when covered by the bird’s droppings were hung on the wall. “Re-reading of the Bible” was translated to English from the Portuguese in a limited edition especially for the exhibition. 1988-1990 In a Village Voice article “On the Money,” Elizabeth Hess wrote: “Argentinean artist León Ferrari has cynically placed two sweet white doves in a cage, whose droppings fall through a cross-shaped hole onto a pristine grid of dollar bills. Somebody will have to launder this money.” June 28, 1988. Ferrari intended to send the soiled bills to President Ronald Reagan to help repay the Latin American debt.
In September 1988, the controversial La Civilización occidental y cristiana [Western Christian Civilization], a store-bought Christ attached to an American fighter jet that Ferrari made in 1965 was shown for the first time in Buenos Aires at the Sívori Museum in an exhibition of Argentine Art from the 1920s to the 1960s. It had been seen only once before in the stage production of Palabras ajenas in 1972. In October 1989, he had his first retrospective exhibition in Buenos Aires at the Sívori Museum. In December, Ferrari participated in a group show at the bookstore Liberarte, protesting President Carlos Menem’s pardon of the military authorities responsible for the deaths of political opponents during the dictatorship; the exhibition was titled “No al indulto” [No to the pardon]. 1991 In March he began Los Errores [the Errors] series, large ink drawings measuring two by one meters, on high-impact polystyrene, smaller papers, and pastels on polystyrene begun in Brazil. “In this series, Ferrari reduced drawing to its purest and most autonomous essence; he utilized the medium to record complex and abstract ideas while maintaining an absolute fidelity to aesthetic purity and technical innovation. They have been rarely exhibited and almost never sold.” John Wineland, Aligning Vision, Alternative Currents in South American Drawings, Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, The University of Texas at Austin, 1997, p.146 Regarding the Los errors series, Ferrari explained: “When I make these written drawings, I am concerned with them being new forms, but only in order to incite people’s imagination. That is why I try not to explain them: explaining destroys the work because the person who created it has no idea of what relationship his work will establish with the viewer. Paintings and drawings that escape the control of the person who made them, going off with the first one who knows how to interpret them better than their progenitor, are adulterous.” (LF, letter to Mari Carmen Ramirez, 6 May 1996, LF Archive) 1992 In “New World Surrealism” an exhibition at the Buenos Aires National Library, Ferrari presented “Homage to the Condom.” Bottles filled with condoms as a visual criticism of the position of the church that persists in prohibiting their use in the midst of the AIDS epidemic. 1993 1994
1996
Ferrari returned to the idea he developed in Cuadro Escrito [The Written Painting] 1964, in the Written Visual Art series. Here his descriptions of sculptures, installations, and objects, were no longer handwritten but typed and then enlarged. It was Ferrari’s response to Eco: the Last Word, an exhibition dedicated to raising awareness for ecology. Ferrari wrote of Written Visual Art they are “paintings, sculptures and installations using only words: the most renewable resource.” 1997 “For the Braille Series I imagined Borges - blind and writing love poems to the girls in the photographs by Man Ray. As if Borges, in love, wrote them lovely poems. The point is: you have to caress the girl to read what the poet wrote.” (LF, Palabras del artista, León Ferrari Escritos en el aire, 1961-2005, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Neuquén, p.29)
Several drawings from the Serie de errores were included in “Re-Aligning Vision, Alternative Currents in South American Drawings” a traveling exhibition curated by Edith A. Gibson and Mari Carmen Ramírez at the Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, The University of Texas at Austin (today The Blanton Museum of Art). 1998 Cantos Paralelos spanned the years between 1960 and 1997, a tumultuous era in Argentina's history. During this time, the country experienced the rise and fall of economic expansion in the 1960s, the period of strict censorship and military repression that followed, and the restoration of democracy in the 1980s. The subject matter of these works often grapples with complex social and political issues such as violence and cultural and sexual stereotyping. Cantos Paralelos not only examined the work of these artists in relationship to Argentina's artistic traditions and recent history, but placed it within the broader context of 20th Century art, revealing affinities to parallel art movements in the United States and Europe. 2000 Published La bondadosa crueldad [Kind Cruelty], a book of poems and collages dedicated to his late son Ariel. In the introduction Ferrari wrote “in our culture, cruelty is so intimately fused to benevolence that it’s concealed by it.” Ferrari’s works were included in Heterotopías - Medio siglo sin lugar, 1918-1968 [Heterotopías - Half-Century of No Place], a seminal survey of Latin American avant- garde work at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid curated by Mari Carmen Ramírez and Héctor Olea. His 1965, Christian and Western Civilization was included in the inaugural exhibition of MALBA [Museo de arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires], Costantini Collection. 2002
2004 - 2005 The Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires presented “Dando Vuelta al Poder” [Turning Power Around], curated by Victoria Noorthoom, with León Ferrari, Luis Camnitzer, François Bucher; three South American conceptual artists, focusing on the paradoxes of the great world powers. In Art Nexus, Victoria Verlichack wrote: “Ferrari presented an installation titled ‘El Diablo’ [The Devil], an implacably ironic and very serious scenario denouncing the explicit misogyny in many passages of the Bible. In his elaborate research, the artist discovered a series of engravings and paintings by Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, the great masters of Western Art where Satan is represented as a female. ...Ferrari focused his criticism on the authoritarian cruelty of Western Civilization, calling attention to the fact that in this tradition, Woman/Eve was not only the first sinner, she was also the devil. As the Devil, women play a duel role: by becoming the axis of evil, and thus are deserving of multiple punishments. Ferrari denounces violence against women, even when it was preached by saints and prophets in Biblical texts. These texts were displayed on the Gallery walls.” (Art Nexus 54, October 2004) In September, New York’s Drawing Center presented, “León Ferrari: Politiscripts.” An exhibition curated by Luis Camnitzer of subversive calligraphic drawings from the 1960s. Holland Cotter in The New York Times wrote: “And because even drawings that may be mere doodles are composed and executed with care, they all convey the impression of carrying coded and encrypted information known only to the artist. In short, they are like a taunting gesture of counter-censorship. Through its very opaqueness, abstraction, real or imagined, becomes a political tool.” “It is in such ways that artists in Latin America, Africa and Asia have created vital, distinctive modernisms even as Euro-American modernism ran out of steam, its radical potential unrealized. The modest show of Mr. Ferrari's influential drawings hints at this dynamic; his collages and sculptures reveal more forcefully, as does his published writing, which can be sampled in ‘Listen, Here, Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s, Writings of the Avant-Garde,’ a terrific anthology recently published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The first three words of the title are borrowed from Mr. Ferrari. They capture his feisty spirit perfectly.” (New York Times, October 8, 2004) In December 2004, Leon Ferrari‘s Retrospective Exhibition (1954-2004), at the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires, curated by Andrea Giunta, caused strong debate. Led by Catholic groups; the Archbishop of Buenos Aires called it “a blasphemy.” Twenty days after the opening, the exhibition was closed by a judge’s decision, it was ordered to re-open eighteen days later by a justice’s order in defense of freedom of expression. The daily reports in the press captured the attention of the public, causing attendance to soar. The coverage focused on the political repercussions of judicial and religious censorship against an institution funded by the government of the City of Buenos Aires. The exhibition broke all attendance records, but at Ferrari’s request due to repeated bomb threats, it closed a month earlier than originally scheduled. MALBA [Museo de arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires] simultaneously presented Ferrari’s Instrumentos para dibujar sonidos [Artifacts to draw sounds]. The instruments had been reconstructed for performances at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. Andrea Giunta, curator of the León Ferrari Retrospective at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, was invited by the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies to lecture about her curatorial project and the debate and controversy in articles and the media about it. The Ferrari retrospective exhibition has become paradigmatic for any discussion on the relationship between art and democracy. (Conversation with Andrea Giunta: León Ferrari Retrospective, curatorial project and debates, October 4, 2005, Bard Center for Curatorial Studies, New York) 2006 In October and November Ferrari attended two important exhibitions of his work in Brazil; Poéticas e Políticas, featured 120 works, some from Brazilian collections, at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, and at the 27th São Paulo Biennial, a special room was dedicated to his work. In his new studio in Buenos Aires, Ferrari continued experimenting with new materials for his hanging sculptures, including plastic human bones, tree branches, sprayed insulation foam, and large paper and canvas panels written with textile paint.
The International Jury at the Venice Biennial awarded León Ferrari a Golden Lion prize. “At the Arsenale, Ferrari presented a body of work that offers examples of a long and substantial career and continuous critical stance in the context of often adverse political and social circumstances. The Jury decided to assign him this prize not only for his ethical and his political effort but also for the contemporary aesthetic relevance of his work developed during the past 60 years.” (Biennial Press Release, Oct.18)
León Ferrari’s first New York Gallery exhibition in 20 years, Serie de errores and works 1962-2007, opened November 29 at Cecilia de Torres, Ltd., with accompanying catalogue.
Chronology compiled from these sources:
León Ferrari Archives, Buenos Aires Poéticas e Políticas, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2006 León Ferrari-A Relentless Critique of Power, text by Gabriela Salgado, University Gallery, University of Essex, 2006 León Ferrari, Escritos en el Aire, 1961-2005, Museo de Bellas Artes de Neuquén, 2005 León Ferrari, Prosa Política, Siglo Veintiuno, Editores, Argentina, 2005 Luis Camnitzer, Flying in Weightlessness, Art Nexus 58, November 2005 Andrea Giunta, Chronology, Retrospectiva, Obras 1954-2004, Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, 2004 Héctor Olea, León Ferrari, From the Drawing of Texts to the Texture of Poetry, Inverted Utopias, Avant-Garde Art in Latin America, The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 2004 Holland Cotter, The New York Times, October, 8, 2004 Victoria Verlichak, Turning Power Around, Art Nexus 54, October 2004 Loreley Gaffoglio, La Iglesia advirtió que la muestra de Ferrari ‘es una blasfemia,’ La Nación, Buenos Aires, 12/2/04 León Ferrari, The Architecture of Madness, text by Gabriela Salgado, University Gallery, University of Essex, 2002 Mari Carmen Ramírez, Cantos Paralelos - Visual Parody in Contemporary Argentinean Art, Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin Texas; Fondo Nacional de las Artes, Argentina, 1999 Re-Aligning Vision Alternative Currents in South American Drawing, Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery, Austin, Texas, 1997 Claudia Laudano, Cuerpos transferidos, Artnif, № 97, Buenos Aires, Autumn 1997 Elizabeth Ness, On the Money, The Village Voice, June 28, 1988 Exit Art Archives, The Debt, press release, June 1988 “Heretic Chapel by León Ferrari,” Franklin Furnace press release, November 1987, Franklin Furnace archives, MoMA, New York
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