Leon Ferrari on exhibit at MALBA (Photo courtesy of MALBA)

Godless societies are on the rise but arguments over religion still rage in Léon Ferrari’s provocative collages. The most glaring idiosyncrasies of Christianity are nowhere more evident than around that heavily contested zone – the female body.

At the entrance to his latest exhibition in Buenos Aires’ Malba, an image of Michelangelo’s Christ, plucked from the Sistine chapel, is superimposed upon a Martin Schreiber nude of the pop icon, Madonna. Displaced from its original context, the marmoreally-contoured, imposing religious figure appears to rise, like a black-and-white surrealist still, from the pop icon’s reclining figure.

The blazing drama of late Italian religious paintings is insistently subjected to Ferrari’s potent re-imaginings. His provocative collages combine a distortionary, surrealist angle with a photomontage technique. Insistently foregrounding unlikely encounters between revered religious iconography, biblical quotations and oriental erotica, Ferrari’s ‘re-readings’ debunk any canonical interpretation, cutting religious and political hegemonies down to parodic size.

The exhibition opens with the mid-90s Braille series: this is Ferrari in a more sober, reticent vein. Scintillating dots overlay biblical images of scenes from the Last Judgment and the Expulsion from Eden, highlighting the seeds of cultural indoctrination. Unlike his bold, provocative collages that offer surface critiques of sexual morality, the transparent film of the braille series works by subtly drawing the viewers’ attention to dominant cultural narratives. Biblical translations are placed as side appendages, pointing to the sources of a 2,000 year history of deceit and repression.

Leon Ferrari interpretation of the "Expulsion from Eden" on display at MALBA (Photo courtesy of MALBA)

From the laconically elegant typeface of his 1960s ‘Cuadros escritos’, Ferrari has insistently sought to foreground the materiality of language, exploring its associative potential. With the braille series, the viewer is silently engaged with the tactile surface bossing: the act of ‘touching’ the historic reproduction implicitly subverts the visual hegemony entrenched in Western iconography. In theory, bringing the viewer into physical contact with the work emancipates them from their role of passive spectatorship. In practice, visitors accustomed to viewing an objet d’art with revered critical distance, approach the work cautiously.

But Ferrari’s work is, nonetheless, compelling purely on the grounds of its wry directness, its wit and pizazz. In the vignettes of the Genesis landscape, ‘I created evil’, a blissfully insouciant Adam and Eve are lectured by a tufted-bearded priest and chased by a stick-wielding angel, casting the nude definitely out of Eden. Each religious figure is relentlessly perforated with Ferrari’s censoring crystals, placing such irrefutable dogmas in skeptical visual parentheses. In ‘The bread of life’, a coy-seeming Christ, his fingertips smeared with blood, heads a table on which plates display his beheaded disciples. Alongside the biblical text reads: “I am the bread of life: He that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth in me shall never thirst.”

The iridescent braille film over Andrea Mategna’s ‘The Lamentation over the Dead Christ’ points to the failure of Christianity to revere both body and soul, offering its own illusion of the spirit rising out of the recumbent body.

The series moves eastward with a series of erotic Japanese prints of couples in elaborate pornographic poses. The playful irreverence of the works depends on the combination of idea, image and biblical caption, of the like of ‘Flee fornication’ and ‘Who eateth my flesh’. While Man Ray’s black-and-white print ‘Eve’ is placed in dialogue with Jorge Luis Borges’ love poem.

In ‘Thou shalt not covert thy neighbour’s wife’, Gustave Courbet’s starkly realist, libertine ‘The Origin of the World’ is divested of its Musée d’Orsay gilded baroque frame and subjected to Ferrari’s braille censor.

Curator Florence Battiti presents a coherent, intelligent retrospective: the contemptuous works are allowed to seamlessly flow together, evoking the ubiquitous narrative of religious doctrine. The ever-so slight variations on the same theme do run the risk of sliding into gratuitous repetition, but Ferrari’s work is at its most probing when it subjects Christianity’s disdain for the flesh to absurdly comic proportions – quite literally in Utagawa Toyokuni’s gruesomely enlarged ‘love thyself’ prints.

A gaudy, technicolour pope presides over a Goya-like multi-layered etchings of hell by Leon Ferrari in MALBA

In the second half of the exhibition, images from the mass media are starkly juxtaposed with religious iconography. A gaudy, technicolour pope presides over a Goya-like multi-layered etchings of hell; a cartoonish God looms over the Vatican; while angels bemusedly contemplate a phallic Roman sculpture.

The provocative temporal and cultural transplantation of these vignettes spin out of Ferrari’s central conviction that the “Bible is an anthology of cruelty”. The images point endlessly to the repressive, violent strains encoded in religious practice; and to the political manipulation of cultural signs. Nothing is self-contained in Ferrari’s world; his most successful pieces work on a theatrical principle of dramatic irony.

The apocalyptic scenes of Hiroshima are viewed through the curtains of Piero della Francesca’s ‘La Madonna Del Parto’; the angels of birth are now depicted as minions heralding the launch of weapons of mass destruction. As in Brueghel’s painting in which the major event is eclipsed by the diurnal round, a couple in Jan van Eyck’s ‘Virgin of Chancellor Rolin’ are absorbed in their ostentatious domestic setting, while in the distance a prospect of war and destruction rages on.

The explicit, intransigent works are testament to Ferrari’s relentlessly inventive, irreverent style. Curated in dialogue with Malba’s concurrent exhibition, Bye Bye American Pie, it offers a provocative, searing critique of the mechanics of political and religious imperialism.

Gaby Messina and Fernando Entin enjoy friendship and work both. (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

“In my opinion, she’s one of the best artists in the region.” Fernando Entin, a Buenos Aires’ gallery owner who works with photographer Gaby Messina, says it like he means it.

“When he’s telling people about my work, he gives his time, his dedication and his love – you don’t get that with everybody,” says Messina, returning the compliment.

Sitting in a café in Belgrano, with the sun streaming through the window, there’s a whiff of suspicion that this lunch-date could turn into a PR event. But it doesn’t take long to realise that the exchanges of flattery are authentic and the warmth between the two is genuine.

Throughout the conversation the pair flash sideways glances at one another, sharing jokes and grabbing each other’s arms in a typically Latin display of affection. Beyond the obvious respect they have for each other’s work, they also seem to enjoy one another’s company.

Embracing the last of summer in a blue floral dress, Messina is personable and engaging. The 41-year-old photographer from Buenos Aires province has exhibited internationally and currently has work hanging in the city’s Museum of Latin American Art (MALBA).

Entin has thick black curly hair and smiles with his whole face. His ebullient personality is infectious and belies his position as the president of the Argentine Association of Contemporary Art Galleries (GALAAC).

In 2010 the pair collaborated for the first time when Messina exhibited her photography series, ‘Lima, Kilometro 100’, at Entin’s Palermo gallery, Elsi Del Rio.

'Hosepipe' courtesy of Gaby Messina

In ‘Lima, Kilometro 100’ Messina took her camera to a small town 100km from Buenos Aires and, over the course of two years, shot portraits of its inhabitants.

“Lima is a small, traditional town in the province where one of the most important nuclear power plants in the country is situated,” she explains. And it’s this contrast between a sleepy town and the enormous nuclear power station that grabbed her attention: “It’s a great location with the perfect cast.”

The series saw the photographer introduce a surreal twist to her portraiture style. Bold, clean and well composed, her photographs make good use of strong colours and geometric shapes. “I love mixing natural light with artificial light,” she says of her technique, which often sees her using beams of light to dissect her images.

Her photographs are sometimes humorous, but many have a darker, more melancholic edge. “My images aren’t decorative. A lot of these photos come from stories that aren’t the most light-hearted.”

The Lima series hints ever so slightly at the work of North American photographer Diane Arbus, famous for photographing the weird and the wonderful on the margins of society.

'Gaucho' courtesy of Gaby Messina

In this case, the transformation of the ordinary to the extraordinary is helped by Messina’s surreal use of props and strange poses, but it’s perhaps the quieter compositions that stand out from the series. Between the more attention grabbing images of a man dressed in a garden hose and a middle aged woman sitting atop a papier-mâché camel, you’ll find subtler shots of a gaucho leaning on a fence, or an old man sitting in a chair holding a pitchfork.

Having previously worked in advertising, Messina finds it easy to work with people. “You’ve got to be a people person but you’ve also got to be a little pushy. If you’re shy and too respectful, you won’t get any good photos.”

But the photographic process isn’t an easy one. “I don’t steal the photos, I have to work for them, and it’s tiring,” she explains. “I have to be switched on and alert all the time so I don’t miss anything.

“Sometimes I get a bit nervous because I’m setting everything up and I don’t have a clue what I’m going to do. People will ask me, ‘Should I be like this, or like that?’ and I’ll answer, ‘I’ve got no idea!’ But I know I’ll find something, because everyone has their own light and their own stories to tell.”

Throughout the conversation, Entin makes a point to highlight Messina’s tireless work ethic: “She never stops producing. Sometimes I’ve got to hold her back and say, ‘Look, you’ve just brought out your second book. Let people digest it a little’, but she’s got so much energy…”

In her latest project Messina turns the camera on her own life for the first time: “At one point I thought, I always tell other people’s stories, now I’m going to get it together and tell my own.”

For Messina, approaching the subject of her father’s death through photography was a way of addressing his death and exploring larger religious issues: “When my father died I stopped believing in the God that, until I was 18, was with me all the time. When my real guardian died, my spiritual guardian died too. And now I’m taking them both with me into the images.

“It’s very intense and very personal,” she says of the new project, which will also launch at Entin’s Elsi del Rio gallery.

“It was a strange place to open a gallery,” Entin says of his decision to open the gallery in Palermo Hollywood back in the year 2000.

“These days it’s Palermo Hollywood, back then it was just Palermo. People looked at me like I was a Martian when I took an old grocery store, recycled it and turned it into a space for contemporary art.”

Fernando in front of his gallery Elsi del Rio in Pallermo Hollywood. (Courtesy of Elsi)

The gallery was expected to hit its own turbulent waters when Argentina’s economic crisis struck, but its success surprised everyone: “People were in such a bad state when the banks took their money that they bought artwork with what they had left. In 2001, 2002 and 2003 we had record sales,” says Entin, still seeming surprised.

Despite the commercial success the crash brought the gallery, Entin and Messina are glad a semblance of normality has returned to the country, but know they can never get too comfortable. “We keep falling down, then getting up again, falling down, getting up, falling down, getting up – It’s part of being Argentine,” comments Messina.

But by all accounts, the tumultuous nature of Argentine life seems to suit their working styles. Entin says Messina is always looking to challenge and do new things in her projects, and she thinks the two work well together: “He’s always searching for new ideas, for change and for – I know it’s an overused word but, transformation.”

For people who enjoy being challenging and pushing the boundaries, these two seem remarkably easy-going and, as the arrival of dessert signals the end of lunch, I’m reminded that there’s nothing that binds Argentines, even the movers and shakers of the art world, like dulce de leche.

Argentina might be geographically peripheral to the artistic reference points of Europe and the US, but it certainly makes up distance in its relentless innovation.

Without the markets or funding bodies conducive to establishing cultural paradigms, nor the finely carved tradition of its counterparts, art in Buenos Aires has been largely the story of crisis, pragmatism and reinvention.

Whether its the muñesquismo graffiti that has transformed the city streets into an ever-evolving urban collage, or the up-and-coming conceptual masters showcased at Ruth Benzacar’s iconic gallery, experimentation is the name of the day.

This week’s Top 5 delivers a handful of the sought-after, scintillating names in the art world who have been collectively instrumental in catapulting Argentina onto an international stage. Whilst they have all spent considerable periods of time abroad, their work remains intrinsically Argentine – impulsive, hybrid, self-reflexive and, at base, optimistic – in its content and conception.

Marta Minujin at her art opening in Recoleta (Photo: Beatrice Murch)

Marta Minujín

Blessed with the conviction of being “the best artist in the world,” Marta Minujín’s art is as incandescent as her sublimely egotistical, public persona.

Taking up where the New York happenings left off, her genre of spectacle has redefined the parameters of Argentine art over the past half century.

From pan dulce obelisks to Carlos Gardel on fire and Fellini-inspired helicopter bombardments, the ever-provocative Minujilandia relentlessly dismantles our most sacrosanct of icons, refracting their historical significance.

Her performance-based installations are driven by a desire to relegate art as static museum display and transform it into something dynamic, radical and, ultimately, destructive. As such, Minujín’s work undergoes a pyrotechnic ritual every few years. Phoenix-like, out of the ashes new creations emerge, unburdened by anything as status quo as cultural legacy.

With her platinum wig, dark glasses and psychedelic pop canvases, she’s frequently referred to as the Argentine Andy Warhol. A commonplace likening that is not without its backstory.

The duo first collaborated on a controversial staging of the Latin American debt crisis in 1985 in which Minujín pays her debt to the US artist in corn, the “Latin American gold..”

For decades, Minujín’s work drew international crowds, but remained largely unrepresented back home. That was until her MALBA retrospective last year which effectively dispelled the myth that her reputation was nothing more than the sum of her eccentric persona. With her Tower of Babel last winter, Minujín is showing no signs of either slackening her output, or taming her Borgesian imaginative flights.

León Ferrari

Trained as an engineer, it wasn’t until a trip to Italy in his mid-thirties that León Ferraridecided to turn his hand to fine art. He quickly shot to fame with ‘Cuadros escritos’ in 1964, a series of calligraphic canvases which explore the regnant cultural premise that language is the paradigm of thought.

León Ferrari, first an enginner became an artist at the age of 30 (photo: Tecnopolis Argentina)

Ferrari’s iconic ‘Civilización occidental y cristiana’ was produced a year later. The sculpture, which figures an image of Christ superimposed upon a US plane plummeting to the ground, was the first in a controversial serious of work that set out to debunk religious iconography.

His political art work came under scrutiny during the last dictatorship, forcing him into exile in Brazil. It was during this period that he produced his esoteric metallic sculptures which include the mesmerising, prismatic ‘Planeta’.

From abstract watercolours to nudes and religious kitsch, Ferrari insistently foregrounds the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. His political critiques of the systematic use of torture and state repression have earned him a reputation – and an Asucena Villaflor de Devincenti award – as an outspoken defender of human rights.

A key influence for a generation of young artists, he has been awarded a number of international prizes including the Leone d’Oro (The Golden Lion) at Venice Biennale in 2007 and the ARCO Centre for Visual Art’s prize in 2010 for the best international artist.

Guillermo Kuitca

With his architectural blueprints and topographic cityscapes, Guillermo Kuitca is often held up as a textbook example of Latin American abstraction. But while his paintings remain in constant dialogue with abstract and cubist painting, his work radically reconfigures that legacy.

Privately trained since the age of nine, he began dabbling with expressionism before moving towards a more conceptual style.

Guillermo Kuitca has been training since he was nine (photo: Jorge Miño)

Sensual and unnerving, the molten blood-red tableau ‘El mar dulce’ (1985) is the apogee of his work from the period. Influenced by the German choreographer Pina Bausch, it stages the bedroom as a paradigm for psychological and physical conflicts.

In 1986 Kuitca stopped exhibiting his work in Buenos Aires providing a seventeen year period in which to “experiment with the idea of exile”. Abroad his focus expanded, as in a cinematic zoom out, from the bedroom to an apartment within the city, to a city within a global map, navigating the complex grounds of communal and private space.

‘Stage Fright’ (2007), was the product of a ten-year long study of opera houses around the globe in which a hallucinatory, synesthetic series of prints direct the performance away from the stage to centre on the audience. More recently, he has turned a hyperrealist eye to baggage carousels, the ultimate image of displaced identity within a global, interconnected world.

Leandro Erlich

Leandro Erlich first made a name for himself with his trompe l’oeil swimming poolat the 2001 Venice Biennale. An extraordinary, visually confounding installation, it allows visitors to enter a pool without getting wet while recreating the same scintillating visual sensation of water.

The trompe l’oeil swimming pool at the 2001 Venice Biennale (photo: Tanaka)

Optical illusions have remained the hallmark of his work. Taking his queue from the French author Georges Perec’s idea of

‘L’infraordinarire’, Erlich sets out to defamiliarize our everyday routine. Automatised practices and the privacy entrenched in urban living come under his interrogative gaze, challenging the viewer’s habitual acts of perception.

Voyeuristic peep holes, inverted mirrors and cross-sections of self-contained apartments are the lenses through which we experience an Erlich installation. By turns ludic and satirical in their approach, they lightly poke fun of the functionality at the heart of bourgeois living.

In ‘Turismo’, designed for the Havana Biennal 2000, he superimposes your average Cuban into a middle-class holiday photo shoot. In

the absence of the all-smiling western subject favoured by advertising campaigns, the images appear strikingly incongruous. As always in Erlich’s work, humour proffers its own critique of the totalising vision implicit in the logic of capitalism and colonialism alike.

With ‘Le Regard’, the latest of Erlich’s works to be exhibited at the Pompidou Centre, his satirical gaze comes into play again. The installation features a French colonial-style apartment, with two windows, one which opens onto a scene of Paris; the other onto a imaginary, coloured view of the streets of Delhi.

Jorge Macchi

Footprints which explode like fireworks, wall paintings which yield to the law of gravity and textless newspaper headlines are the signature of Jorge Macchi’s visually compelling works.

In his Lewis Carroll-esque creations, the world as we know it is temporarily suspended and given over to a parallel, experiential logic. His work filters the dimensions of time and space through the way we experience them, rather than as abstract formulae, so that seemingly innocuous objects become echo-chambers of memories and associations.

Macchi´s work is considered changelling to the viewers eyes (Photo: Intelligensius Anarchus & The Great Attractor)

Maps are central to Macchi’s creative output. Whether it’s his ‘Buenos Aires Tour’ (2004), an alternative guide book to the city, or the collage ‘Lilliput’ (2007), in which the position of countries are subject to the logic of chance, his itineraries depend on the provisional and the contingent.

Bridging the expressive, psychologically-charged content of painting with the objective, non-narrative gaze of the conceptual artist, Macchi uncovers the mysterious connections which lie concealed beneath a surface banality.

Rather than staging a scenario, his installations work by subtly disrupting relations between objects, challenging the viewer to uncover latent patterns and associations.

Many of Macchi’s installations rely on synchronized music and light, with a crisscrossed visual projection of cut-out words. Shifting background noise to the foreground and focusing on the tension between intention and interpretation, he plays with the media’s monopoly on our hierarchy of events, proffering his own, more idiosyncratic sequence.

Tightly plotted, yet open-ended, like the deceptively simple ‘Horizonte’ (2002), the emotional resonance of Macchi’s work always exceeds the sum of its parts.