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| Ferrari León Born in 1920 in Buenos Aires. Lives and works in Argentine. León Ferrari’s versatile practice encompasses collages made with Christian iconography, oriental erotica and camouflage, installations made with living birds in cages, board games, sculptures made with bottles and manikins, photographs intervened with texts written in Braille, written paintings, and electronic art. In 1962 he began a series of written drawings that he called Escrituras Deformadas/Deformed Writings. To this group of calligraphies belongs El árbol embarazador/The Impregnating Tree (1964) the first of his works to be openly critical of Christianity, criticism that became a constant preoccupation of his oeuvre. The resourceful use of hand written text as painting material, as code, as graphisms or deformed calligraphies is a recurring feature that inundates multiple surfaces such as canvases, mannequins, paper and clothing or is laid over imagery. In 1965 he submitted the controversial sculpture La Civilización Occidental y Cristiana/ The Christian and Western Civilisation for exhibition at the Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires. This work, depicting Christ crucified on a US bomber, was censored from the show, in 1965, and repeatedly caused antagonism from religious groups during his retrospective exhibition at Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, in 2004. The complete series of collages comprising religious imagery pasted over the pages of the Vatican published newspaper L’Osservatorio Romano (2001) are presented in this exhibition. By using this readymade support for the addition of imagery cut from reproductions of depictions of hell in classical painting, Ferrari activates a conceptual association that turns into an open denunciation. The horrors of hell interpreted by the Old Masters become here the illustration of ecclesiastical news, used by the Vatican to disseminate doctrine on a regular basis. Ferrari’s public condemnation of the Catholic Church is manifest in these series as a clear association with its historical involvement in political persecution, torture and war. His board games are similarly turned into battlefields where armies made of religious icons, pets and weapons are aligned in ironic confrontations: oversized mice against miniature cats, a solitary Jesus opposite a multitude of demons or a circle of virgins passionately casting their eyes on Exu, the Afro- American representation of the devil. The complexity of power relations, with their implied violence and desire presented as games in these works provoke an unusual marriage between a profound sense of irony and a playful light heartedness. In his endless search for new materials Ferrari’s practice has broadened to encompass the use of written devises such as Braille language which he imprints over images selected from art history, religious and secular, photographs or news print. By laying textured text over a Man Ray’s photograph or a Japanese erotic print, he impregnates the image with a physical quality, performing a semiotic manipulation of the texts -to be touched with the finger tips and not read with the eyes, as if an exercise of sensuality was necessary in order to capture the message contained in the image. This combination of disparate elements and operations produces a powerful visual metaphor for the notions of sin and physical pleasure contained in much of Ferrari’s works. Gabriela Salgado  Download CV |  Ajedrez/Chessboard, 2004 Amate Love yourself, 1997 L´Osservatore Romano, 2001 Tarde que socavó nuestro adiós, 2004 |
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