ARCOMADRID

Consensus is rare when it comes to validating an artist’s production. In 2007, however, when León Ferrari was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, the prize was a statement that recognized in his journey an inseparable connection between aesthetic relevance and critical stance. It could not have been otherwise for someone whose son had been disappeared and killed by the Argentine civil-military dictatorship. In light of this, one can assert that he turned personal and collective mourning into a struggle that became the project of a lifetime. With an engagement he showed perhaps even before embracing the artistic career, he investigated the complicity of the Catholic Church with the Armed Forces — a complicity, it should be noted, that predates the coup d’état — in their aim to prohibit and repress not only human beings but everything alive around them. In this sense, the search for his son and the exploration of biblical scripture converge towards an irreducible purpose: to denounce the deceit of the civilizing justification of Jesuit missions in America and to unveil their complicity with local persecutions.

Yet León Ferrari did not limit himself to the specific case of Argentina and frequently referenced the broader Cold War context; nor did he make the Catholic religion his sole sphere of analysis—he remained attentive to the violence committed on the basis of social class, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and identity. This ethical and political awareness distinguished him from a generation of artists who, like him, were developing formal research based on the rupture of the plane.

Certainly, unlike the conceptual art prop.ated in Europe and the United States, the conceptualisms born in countries with a colonial past and extractivist context would absorb the fabric of global conflict into their semantics. The Vietnam War affected him irreparably and drew a line of no return, an internal rift to which the realm of literary criticism reserves the untranslatable term ‘Bildungsroman.’ When asked which work is emblematic of León Ferrari, the always unequivocal answer highlights The Western and Christian Civilization (1965), in which a sculpture depicting a crucified Jesus is attached to the fuselage of a toy American bomber, pointed downwards. This work must be seen as a kind of anticipatory synthesis that provides the main pillars for the forthcoming series.