Luis Felipe Noé, the artist and art critic, portrays León Ferrari as someone who questions reality, particularly the justice as well as aesthetics and existence itself. He places Ferrari in the hierarchy of generations, pointing out that the artist himself synthesizes the various stages of his own work. Noé also refers to certain conceptual approaches in Ferrari’s work. 

León Ferrari (1920–2013) was born in Buenos Aires, the son of Augusto Cesare Ferrari, the Italian artist and architect. The younger Ferrari was a latecomer to the plastic arts, a status which allowed him to function as a link between the generation of artists from the late fifties and the young avant-garde of the sixties. His early works were ceramic sculptures, but in later years he experimented with wire structures, with a visual form of writing, and with collages. There are two distinct themes running through his work: one is a strong condemnation of military dictatorships, American imperialism, and the ideology of the Catholic Church. The other has a more formalistic quality, expressed in a conceptual style and, at times, in the surrealist tradition. His 1965 object-montage, titled Civilización Occidental y Cristiana [Western Christian Civilization], was censured at theCentro de Artes Visuales del Instituto Torcuato Di Tella [the Torcuato Di Tella Institute’s Visual Arts Center] (see documents 743800, 744085, and 761879). It depicts a Christ mounted on a US Air Force bomber that is plunging Earthward. Ferrari was involved in the political conceptualism movement of the seventies (particularly Tucumán Arde, in 1968). In response to the most recent Argentine military dictatorship’s repressive regime (1975-83), he went into exile in Brazil, where he explored a variety of ideas, such as formalism and the reproducibility of a work, as well as the spatial relationship between sculpture and music (see documents 743960, 744392, and 743870, among others). In 1984 his work was once again exhibited in Buenos Aires, where he finally returned and settled.   Luis Felipe Noé was involved in Otra Figuración, the Argentine group that was active in the early sixties, together with Ernesto Deira, Rómulo Macció, and Jorge de la Vega.  Álvaro Castagnino was Director of Galería Arte Nuevo.  The political collages that portray art as minion of both political and sexual repression imposed by the Catholic Church were begun in Brazil during the final years of Ferrari’s time in exile. A collage series Releitura da Bíblia [A Re-Reading of the Bible], and the book of collages: León Ferrari, Parahereges [León Ferrari: For Heretics] (São Paulo: Editora Expressão, 1986).