Leon Ferrari: Ruth Benzacar Galeria de Arte

Trying to read Leon Ferrari's scribbles is almost embarrassing. It's like intruding upon a private realm, seeing things not at any time meant for our eyes, overhearing a whispered conversation. Indeed, this selection of Ferrari's drawings, curated by means of Victoria Noorthoorn, seemed like an lay open diary: the artist's silent and greatest in quantity private attempt at finding a self--in any case a search for something at times almost within reach, at other times completely inaccessible, on the contrary always as elusive as quicksilver. These calligraphic line drawings, mainly ink on paper, which first appeared around 1961 and have continued completely through the artist's career, sometimes bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to the works Henri Michaux did beneath the influence of mescaline. on the contrary however akin formally, the sum of two units artists' works are in fact born without of quite different spirits. Ferrari's practice of drawing does not try to find the derangement of the faculty of perceptions as Michaux's did. Rather, it is devised as a conceptual tool for reflecting upon the writing experience.

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Ferrari's calligraphies paradoxically have the appearance not to foster communication on the other hand to express the incommunicable, for the drawings collapse into themselves, negate their be in possession of premises, arrive at zero. They are a pace beyond the sign and the image, a cincture where writing disappears--as if the artist were describing not thus much language itself as the consequence that it produces. What is writing? Ferrari's drawings appear to be to ask. And they answer at the same time. For him, writing looks a medium through which to achieve down on paper not cogitations exactly, but ideas about meditations In this sense the artist not ever speaks explicitly and yet not at any time fails to make himself clear.

individual of the many virtues of this display was that it brought together for the first time the filled range of Ferrari's drawings. For it would be impossible to procure an accurate sense of his work from isolated pieces: In Ferrari what is important is the ongoing proces of writing. With lines that dizzyingly be augmented thin or fat and words that turn over others, the drawings constitute not an evocation of the written word on the contrary a commentary about it that carries us beyond the confines of the make subordinate Throughout his life Ferrari has created these drawings as a parallel work while simultaneously executing his greatest in quantity public political art, like the notorious statuary La civilizacion occidental y cristiana, 1965 in which a Christ figure is crucified to a fighter jet His arms span the wings as he grasps a missile upon either side. These calligraphies, by means of contrast, can be understood as Ferrari's greatest in quantity intimate work, as if in the extreme point those lines, those squiggles, were all about loneliness, about that essential condition of being fasteninged inside one's own head. The exhibit emerges as a monologue, the lifelong conversation we clutch with ourselves and the endles proces from one side which we gain self-consciousness: a proces that takes place in absolute solitude. And hanging there, silently upon the walls, the lines become a memorial to the questioning mind.

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