Leon Ferrari
(images courtesy of Cecelia de Torres Gallery)
The Museum of Modern Art catalog for January 2008 arrived in the mail and I was stunned by the cover. It features a recent purchase, a drawing by Argentinian artist Leon Ferrari.
I don’t know Ferrari’s work well but his name caught my eye when I read that he won the Golden Lion at the latest Venice Biennale. Digging a little deeper, I discovered that he is having his first gallery exhibition in New York now through February at the Cecilia de Torres Gallery in Soho.
These “written drawings” are beguiling in the way good Cy Twomblys can be beguiling. Ferrari’s drawings are more minimal, with a controlled and centered quality. They feel invitational, their intricacies creating an intimacy of viewing.
Here is more from the Cecilia de Torres online catalog:
In these stunning large ink drawings on paper and on high impact polystyrene, Ferrari reduced drawing to its purest and most autonomous essence, to record complex and abstract ideas. An engineer by training, Ferrari used the mathematical curve called a sinusoid, which is the Cartesian representation of an angle’s sine, as his point of departure.
The artist stated that “the obsessive repetition of the curve in its apparently boring uniformity is free only to make mistakes, lithely wriggling on the paper knowing that it will never attain the perfection of the leg of the hypotenuse. A drawing then can be the sum of infinite, persevering errors that the pen makes as it caresses the paper leaving its black ink trail.”
For more images, go to the Cecelia de Torres website.
I love these scribbles! His work is so evocative, captivating, familiar and…funny.
So glad to hear you find them enchanting too. I am going to try to get the show before it comes down. Fingers crossed that I get my own work finished in time so that I can make the trip.
Why is it that math intrigues so these days? I love writing poems based on the Fibonacci sequence, and Pi. I’ll have to look up sinusoid to see what I can do with it.
His drawings are ethereal, like insect wings.
Good luck on getting your work done.
Thank you Christine. I’m going to need lots of luck.
I wrote an extensive comment and forgot to click on “submit comment” so it was probably lost. I discovered Leon Ferrari’s work at MOMA last Sunday and it was a major discovery for me. I didn’t respond much to his politically based collages but I became completely enthralled by his graphic work and his letters. A friend who saw the exhibit said that his paintings made her think of mine; perhaps the attraction lies in the similarity of approach. I know his meandering lines as I know my own. I felt, “I have to meet him! I feel I know him!”. I have loved Cy Twolmby’s work but Ferrari’s is even more intimate.
I am an artist and a psychoanalyst and have written papers about creativity, including my own. I live in Venice, California, for many years but I was born and raised in Chile. Is there a chance that he would get this message? I would appreciate if you could help me get in touch with him. He can look at my Boulez pieces in my website and confirm our kinship. These pieces were based on 9 movements composer/conductor Pierre Boulez wrote about 9 poems by surrealist poet Renée Char entitled Le Marteau Sans Maitre. I attempted a careful translation of the auditory into the visual and did 9 mixed-media small paintings based on those movements. Boulez saw them in one of his visits to LA and knew exactly which one was which. I have also “translated” one of Shostakovich’s quartets and one of Piazzola’s tangos.
Please let me know you received this.