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Lot Essay
A foundational figure in Latin American conceptualism, Ferrari made iconoclasm the keynote of a practice that redefined the boundaries of language and structured new modes of communication. Across more than six decades, his work bore critical witness to his ethical engagement of art as political praxis, from the infamous and oft-censored La civilización occidental y cristiana (1965), a sculpture in which a crucifix is adjoined to an American bomber, to the idiomatic delirium of his Escrituras deformadas. Inseparable from his artwork, his aesthetics—“art will be neither beauty nor novelty; art will be efficacy and perturbation”—spirited his practice through his exile in Brazil (1976-91) and numerous high-profile exhibitions in which he censured the repressions of Argentina’s military junta and the Catholic church, a perennial bête noir. [1]
Ferrari found a warm reception in São Paulo, befriended by such artists as Regina Silveira and Paulo Bruscky who shared his interests in experimental media and technology. Among his most remarkable works from this period is a series of metal sculptures, progressed from his first wire pieces of the early 1960s and their explorations of line and movement. Labyrinths of thin, stainless-steel rods, these new sculptures thematized enclosure and control, calibrated—as in the present Untitled—between cage-like, rectilinear frames and jagged webs of wire. Their graphic entanglements have an origin in the cryptic scrawls of his earlier, abstract drawings and relate closely to the asphyxiated metropolis mapped in the contemporary Heliografías, absurdist architectural blueprints of urban and everyday space.
“I take a pen and begin a line inside the paper’s rectangle and tomorrow, another line in another rectangle and the day after tomorrow another: always in rectangles,” Ferrari wrote around 1979, reflecting on the evolution of the rectangle from two into three dimensions. “The rectangular drawing can also be repeated in the air, and projected, it becomes a prism whose faces and edges are now the anonymous frame, the repeated impersonal transparent envelope within which a line simply has to find its place. So then threads, straight or curved wires cross each other and sustain each other add to one another tangle with one another in a labyrinth connected to another and another close to a vertex or to a faraway edge with a sun, an explosion, a nest of lines half hidden behind the others or mixed with others that are behind it that cover or uncover it depending on how the light or the retina move…” [2]
The spatial projection and complexification that Ferrari describes is manifest in Untitled, in which an open, rectangular prism tilts precariously in space, suspended within a haphazard column of knotted wires. Like Lembrenças de meu pai (1977), the sculpture hypostatizes transparency and entrapment, its geometry of soldered knots and interstitial spaces a Kafkaesque meditation on postmodern alienation and futility. Freedom would come in the form of sonic release: in the related berimbau (sound-making sculptures), Ferrari strummed steel rods—mounted vertically onto a base—as if they were musical instruments, releasing a song of liberation.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 León Ferrari, “The Art of Meanings,” in León Ferrari Retrospectiva: Obras 1954-2004, exh. cat. (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2004), 399.
2 Ferrari, “Prisms and Rectangles,” in ibid., 400.
Ferrari found a warm reception in São Paulo, befriended by such artists as Regina Silveira and Paulo Bruscky who shared his interests in experimental media and technology. Among his most remarkable works from this period is a series of metal sculptures, progressed from his first wire pieces of the early 1960s and their explorations of line and movement. Labyrinths of thin, stainless-steel rods, these new sculptures thematized enclosure and control, calibrated—as in the present Untitled—between cage-like, rectilinear frames and jagged webs of wire. Their graphic entanglements have an origin in the cryptic scrawls of his earlier, abstract drawings and relate closely to the asphyxiated metropolis mapped in the contemporary Heliografías, absurdist architectural blueprints of urban and everyday space.
“I take a pen and begin a line inside the paper’s rectangle and tomorrow, another line in another rectangle and the day after tomorrow another: always in rectangles,” Ferrari wrote around 1979, reflecting on the evolution of the rectangle from two into three dimensions. “The rectangular drawing can also be repeated in the air, and projected, it becomes a prism whose faces and edges are now the anonymous frame, the repeated impersonal transparent envelope within which a line simply has to find its place. So then threads, straight or curved wires cross each other and sustain each other add to one another tangle with one another in a labyrinth connected to another and another close to a vertex or to a faraway edge with a sun, an explosion, a nest of lines half hidden behind the others or mixed with others that are behind it that cover or uncover it depending on how the light or the retina move…” [2]
The spatial projection and complexification that Ferrari describes is manifest in Untitled, in which an open, rectangular prism tilts precariously in space, suspended within a haphazard column of knotted wires. Like Lembrenças de meu pai (1977), the sculpture hypostatizes transparency and entrapment, its geometry of soldered knots and interstitial spaces a Kafkaesque meditation on postmodern alienation and futility. Freedom would come in the form of sonic release: in the related berimbau (sound-making sculptures), Ferrari strummed steel rods—mounted vertically onto a base—as if they were musical instruments, releasing a song of liberation.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
1 León Ferrari, “The Art of Meanings,” in León Ferrari Retrospectiva: Obras 1954-2004, exh. cat. (Buenos Aires: Centro Cultural Recoleta, 2004), 399.
2 Ferrari, “Prisms and Rectangles,” in ibid., 400.