León Ferrari. Brailles y Relecturas de la Biblia

With a selection of 70 works from León Ferrari's series Brailles and Relecturas de la Biblia, created over the course of three decades and known only partially up to now, the Malba – Costantini Foundation presents León Ferrari. Brailles y Relecturas de la Biblia, an individual exhibition curated by Florencia Battiti.

The exhibition puts on display a large number of works from two of Ferrari's most significant series. Relecturas de la Biblia, started in the mid-80s—while the artist was still in exile in São Paulo—is comprised of collages that juxtapose religious iconography with images taken from Oriental erotic art of from the mass media.

The effect of the montage policy activated by the artist in this kind of work is that of unmasking , through the convergence of two realities from different historical times, the connections between religion and violence that flow under the biblical discourse.

In turn, Brailles, a series started in the late '90s, works with reproductions of religious, erotic, or art-historical images upon which Ferrari engraves Braille texts that are also taken from the Bible, or from the work of writers such as Jorge Luis Borges. An example is Tarde que socavó nuestro amor, a poem by Borges on a photograph by Man Ray, which won for Ferrari the Grand Prize at the Mar del Plata Salon in 1997. By printing a Braille text on the image of a nude body or a torture instrument, Ferrari extends an explicit invitation for viewers to engage in physical contact with art (sliding their fingers over the reproduction), and confronts them with the paradox of "touching" a work of art (an action that is often prohibited in a museum) and of "caressing" images that have a high erotic content.

León Ferrari. Brailles y Relecturas de la Biblia will remain open to the public through July 2^nd, 2012.