Leon Ferrari. A Languaje Rhapsody

GIUNTA, ANDREA

Nueva York

Conferencia; Tangled Alphabets, Leon Ferrari and Mira Schendel; 2009

Museum of Modern Art, New York

We know of the enchantment that the beauty of Leon Ferrari’s drawings has over our sensibility, the trail of those lines that go through the plane stopping in certain zones in which they intertwine, grow thinner, let the ink expand, and then leave, once again, as fast traces on the plane. We remain hypnotized by the imaginary maps that these lines trace on the plane. A similar effect, but impregnated by a smile, is what his heliographies produce. Extensive panoptic in which we would never like to live in but that present to us, situations filled with humor: rooms populated by beds, toilets, and conference tables. Leon has made us go through those labyrinth-like forms, traveling among its multitudes, wondering through its spaces, walking in the streets of imaginary cities, so impregnated at the same time, by the rhythm of the great city, San Pablo. I could keep describing hundreds of works in which one desires to get lost with gaze and thought; works shaped by the challenge of imagining new spaces, graphic densities, tongues that were never spoken, as if he were looking to anticipate a different world, possible, at least, within the limits of the paper. But what I would like to refer to today, briefly, is to the corrosive power of works that constitute the other side of this murmuring beauty. I would like to refer to the power of certain images that have pointed out a moment in history, constituting strong icons that have out limited the borders of his country. A group of collages and objects that today can be read as a manifesto against the wars that have marked the 20th century and that renew themselves in the present.