león ferrari león ferrari, for a world with no Hell,

In 2009, the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA) organized the exhibition "Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel" (Luiz Pérez-Oramas curator), which traveled to Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain) and the Iberê Camargo Foundation (Porto Alegre, Brazil), gathering a wide range of works by both artists. The MoMA exhibition sought to emphasize the ways of inserting verbal language into the field of visuality.

Almost ten years later, this time at the Nara Roesler Gallery, which represents the artist’s estate,  the city of New York welcomes a precise selection of León Ferrari’s production, whose name is inscribed in the artistic avant-garde of Latin American experimentalism and conceptualism . It is now about looking at only twenty collages and asking: what are these alphabets for? And what do the images associated with them say?

Between poetic fragments and divine verdicts, the curator surmises hypotheses about “the Alpha and the Omega" (the beginning and the end) of León Ferrari (Buenos Aires, 1920-2013), who upheld the import of truth carried by the Word, come hell or high water. The Hebrew word for truth is emet, whose first and last letters are also the first and last of the Hebrew alphabet, just as the Greek Alpha and Omega.

Especially conceived for the gallery’s intimate venue, the current selection sought to highlight one of the fundaments of an artistic life spanning almost sixty years: erotic pleasure. The show is structured from the 1964 collage La Venus tocada [Venus touched], in which the completely naked armless sculpture is fondled by eleven human hands. This odd number suggests the intrusion of the artist's hand into the picture, while the body’s representation turning its back adds a valuable androgynous component to the definition of beauty.

The other collages chosen to dialogue with Ferrari’s Venus are from 1986-88 and 1996-98, juxtaposing the need to bring a repertoire beyond the Greco-Roman model and a language able to refer to sensorial energy: Eastern iconography and Braille , the dot writing system for the blind. Both are emblematic of the artist’s persistence in the love theme over decades. Yet his conception, far from being platonic, confronts the discrimination of homosexuality and the misogyny of the Holy Scriptures, interspersed with penalties and hells.

The fusion of mysticism and blindness simultaneously applies to texts and images, considering that the text is an image. Ferrari himself already stated that the graphism on his paintings derives from an abstract blur. Indeed, his 1962 hard-ground etchings and China ink drawings were still untitled or designated as "music", as if they were scores - a sphere of action to which he will radically dedicate himself through the conception of instruments for concerts and public performances. In the next year, the artist started the series called "Letters to a General", with no mention of a specific sender. These writings thickened into texts at the edge between readability and invention, and began to require a complex engine for their interpretation.

León Ferrari created meshes of lines to question canonical excerpts, a process that arises from distorted handwritings to the point of misreading or inspiring imaginary codes, proposing an inaccessible language. Its indecipherable character is an allusion to both the failure of the rationalist project and the secret vocabulary used under military regimes to evade police controls. This idea unfolded into sculptures of stainless steel, bronze and copper, referring to the notion of "babelism", the anarchic confusion between different languages.

Doubt constitutes an indispensable tool in Ferrari’s thought structure. In many cases, it yielded corrosive works, defying commandments and political and scientific doctrines. It is known that the artist was a founding member of CIHABAPAI (Club of the wicked, heretics, apostates, blasphemers, atheists, pagans, agnostics and infidels), which in 1997 asked the Pope for the annulment of the Last Judgment and immortality and in 2001 for the revocation and demolition of Hell.

As the artist explains, biblical scriptures are at the root of this conditioning. While scenes of sex and violence are permitted in religious works decorating various Italian chapels without any prior notice on their content, images that expose the pleasure of sex are liable to be censored.

Thus, the relations between Art and Power define the main axes of his work and construct a vehement denunciation of violence. The 1965 Vietnam War underpins the first explicit reference of the artist's path, permeated by his tireless political struggle to defend freedom. León Ferrari left Argentina with his family in 1976 because of the military coup and moved to São Paulo, only to return for good in 1992.

In that sense, fulfilling the expectations for every breakup movement, the artist’s public figure became inseparable from a production as extensive as it is multifaceted, obsessive, controversial and good-humored. Aside from questioning the incoherence of the texts that distinguish Western civilization, the artist transferred the method of doubt to the universe of pictures that belong in the World Heritage for their artistic quality, because the scenes painted by Giotto, Tintoretto, Titian, Doré or Rubens recount biblical stories whose cult value, as pointed out by Walter Benjamin, has been replaced by their exhibition value.