October 13, 2004
León Ferrari at the Drawing Center
Artforum.com has posted my review of "León Ferrari: Politiscripts" at the Drawing Center. I am in Boston—posting this note from the lobby of the MIT List Visual Arts Center, in fact—and have also archived the text at BrianSholis.com. Here is the review:
This gemlike exhibition brings New Yorkers a small taste of the artistic activity that flourished in Latin and South America at mid-century. León Ferrari, an octogenarian well known in his native Argentina, created this series of "written" drawings between 1962 and 1965. The majority of those included here consist of both self-generated and appropriated handwritten text, often political, torqued toward near-abstraction (but meant to be decoded by those in the know). These small works evoke the nervous intensity of Henri Michaux's mescaline-influenced drawings or Fluxus-affiliated composer Robert Watts's mid-1950s collages. At the same time, they anticipate the enchantingly varied mark-making of Brice Marden's early 1990s ink drawings and hover at the center of a Venn diagram connecting calligraphic writing, musical notation, and Abstract Expressionism. The malleability of Ferrari's line is an apt metaphor for the flexibility necessary to dissidents who must find ways to express themselves under repressive political regimes. But the drawings do not buckle under the weight of their multiple duties—they served admirably as a political instrument in their time, and stand as valuable documentation and as visually compelling artworks in ours.
I really do recommend the show. It's on view until October 23.