Written Painting

In Latin American art, "Cuadro escrito" is an emblematic work. Insofar as it anticipates Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual art, it marks the passage toward the de-objectification of the work of art while also partaking of a subjective expressivity that sets it apart from rigid North American conceptualism. This work forms part of Ferrari’s “Manuscritos” [Manuscripts] series—thirty works produced in 1964 and 1965 where cursive, gestural, and continuous handwriting is used to “draw” texts. Ferrari would, in these works, tell stories that he had imagined, some of them based of news stories or biblical tales (the artist would change the endings). Interspersed in those stories are “odd words” that Ferrari would choose randomly from the dictionary; the words, included because of their phonetic appeal, not their meaning, cut off understanding of the story. Regarding these works, Ferrari stated, “The shape of writing, how the words are drawn is no less part of their meaning than the tone of the voice that reads them. I write drawings to recount thoughts, images that words do not know how to tell.” Drawing, for Ferrari, was a mental exercise that activated creative processes. Through it, he set out to innovate language while also exploring its visual and semantic potential. In "Cuadro escrito", writing and painting are enmeshed on the basis of the fictional hypothesis that opens the text in the work. It reads: “If I knew how to paint, if God, disturbed and confused in his great rush, had reached out and touched me by mistake, I would gather fine marten’s hairs at the end of a branch from an ash tree, dip it in vermil- lion oil and, at that very spot, make a fine line with the idea of later covering it in transparency, all that next to a pitch-black abyss.” The artist thus subtly alters the visual device with a discursivity that dematerializes the potential painting by means of a conceptual operation. After a meticulous description of what he would do if he actually knew how to paint, Ferrari concludes, “But God didn’t want it to be; when my turn came up, He over- looked my soul, outstretched and begging for charity by His side. It did not please him to touch me: His hand was amused making valleys and Alafia’s buttocks. He didn’t want to distract himself from Alafia. Even though it was my turn, He overlooked me.”