11 September - 30 November 2008

It seems to me that everything, absolutely everything, is the raw material for making art: from colours, canvases, clay, up to time, ideas, garbage, torments, politics, death, rottenness, kitsch and dung.

León Ferrari is someone who does, who “looks for aesthetic materials and invents laws to organize them around meanings” managing to incorporate the most immediate reality as a material for the renewal of his language. Ferrari is among those artists who find it ridiculous and naive, if not useless, to label his work in a narrow genre. He actually says: "... when someone goes to one of my shows he has the impression of seeing a group show because first I do a series and then I leave it and then I do another. For a long time, I have made sculptures of welded steel and other knotted sculptures like the ones I am doing now ".
I dare to say that there are two lines of interpretation throughout his work: one sophisticated, where aesthetics appear in the first place, and the other where highly politicized messages surprise us in the middle of an image, both dominated by an ironic and transgressive sense of humour. Ferrari states “I have done and still do two types of works: some have no ethical intention: paintings, abstract drawings, steel sculptures, etc. In others, I use aesthetics to question the ethics of Western culture.
The division between these two types of works is not so clear-cut. In 1963 he wrote at the foot of a very elegant intertwining of lines "letter to a General" starting a series of complaints to the increasingly strong and implacable military regime in Argentina.
In 1965 in La civilización Occidental y Cristiana (undoubtedly one of the strongest works of the twentieth century) he superimposes a Santeria Christ on an FH107 bomber shouting his condemnation against the Vietnam War. In 1968 he is one of the most active figures in Tucumán Arde. Today he speaks to us of injustice and tyranny in his diaries, collages, and assemblages.
His speeches overlap, intertwine, and add up dramatically both in sculpture and in drawing, writing, installations, and video. The themes of dialogue, are repeated in the critique of dominant values, disproportionate power or reigning violence, eroticism and irony, and the celebration of women (as in the sensual model of Man Ray covered with love poems by Borges in braille that you have to caress to read, or in the elegant mannequins covered with texts).

In this exhibition at Palazzo Palumbo Fossati we are faced with a set of works that create a sensory journey that struck the viewer, this time European. León Ferrari's work is constant experimentation with materials and themes. It is up to the visitor to discover the message it contains: as happens with white polyurethane, which, covered with black cockroaches, receives us at the entrance, with the sphere of flowers, sparrows and mice hanging in the courtyard and with the series of multicoloured musicians.
We begin the journey with the beautiful canvases covered with writings. Like the “drawings”, the canvases are made with a calligraphic stroke that, at times, produces a flood of indecipherable lines that occupy the white space. We will return to see these expressive, spontaneous and abstract calligraphies, with perfect lines and refined beauty in the drawings/writings of the last rooms.
In a moment of the journey, we find ourselves surrounded by the "chorreados" that have reminiscences of writing and scribbling, of drawings and drafts: "I like the chorreado because it deforms the stroke and you can also adjust it, you are in control".
In the set of heliographies and collages, we find a severe criticism of society. The heliographic copy, a system of representation typical of architecture and construction until the appearance of the graphical computation, here reworked, acquires a new meaning. It serves to represent the altered universe of the city: streets, urban design, crowds; here mechanical reproduction serves for social and cultural criticism, a metaphor for the asphyxiation of creation in many current situations. It is “laughter as a cry”
The collages, as in Nunca mas or Nosotros no sabìamos, show us the horrors of the military government - with the repression that took a son from him and forced him to emigrate to Brazil -, of Nazism, wars or 'Inquisition.
Almost half a century after his first exhibition in Italy  Leòn Ferrari, the son of a renowned Italian architect, painter and photographer, creates an exhibition in Venice itself which awarded him the Golden Lion of the 2007 Biennale. With this set of works Leòn Ferrari, considered by many to be one of the greatest exponents of Latin American conceptualism, fills us with beauty, poetry, tension, restlessness, criticism and pleasure.

Irma Arestizabal