Above: Sin título (Caligrafia: texto de ‘Elogio de la sombra’, J.L.Borges, 1969), 1997 Untitled (Calligraphy: text from ‘In Praise of Darkness’, J.L. Borges, 1969)

León Ferrari (1920 - )

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This untitled calligraphy is a transcription of part of a poem by Jorge Luis Borges into a pictorial object. Entitled Elogio de la Sombra, the poem dates from 1969 when Borges was losing his sight and describes the process of becoming blind. In this work Ferrari uses the poem both as idea and material.

The handwriting is highly curvilinear and irregular, closer to drawing than to writing, and it is laid on a layer of marks made on the page with white lacquer. These signs create a sense of depth and also provide a texture to the surface. The signs and white layers compose a significant synthesis by merging the concept and its visual manifestation: parts of the text are entangled and overlapped to suggest optical confusion while others float on the page in isolated statements like serene islands.

This calligraphy belongs to the series of works on paper entitled Escrituras Deformadas (Deformed Writings). The calligraphies emerged as one of the many strands in Ferrari’s career in 1963, when he created the Letters to a General, a series that inaugurated a highly visual and politicised direction for conceptualism. Since then Ferrari has continued to make works in the form of calligraphies and employs the most varied supports, including mannequins, glass sheets, board or paper, photographs, newsprint and even pieces of clothing.  via: escala.org

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Calligraphy text, from Borges, Elogio de la Sombra:
Mis amigos no tienen cara,
las mujeres son lo que fueron hace ya tantos años,
las esquinas pueden ser otras, no hay letras en las páginas de los libros.
Todo esto debería atemorizarme,
pero es una dulzura, un regreso.
De las generaciones de los textos que hay en la tierra
sólo habrá; leído unos pocos,
los que sigo leyendo en la memoria,
leyendo y transformando.

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In Praise of Darkeness

Jorge Luis Borges

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Old age (the name that others give it)
can be the time of our greatest bliss.
The animal has died or almost died.
The man and his spirit remain.
I live among vague, luminous shapes
that are not darkness yet.
Buenos Aires,
whose edges disintegrated
into the endless plain, has gone back to being the Recoleta, the Retiro,
the nondescript streets of the Once,
and the rickety old houses
we still call the South.
In my life there were always too many things.
Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes in order to think:
Time has been my Democritus.
This penumbra is slow and does not pain me;
it flows down a gentle slope,
resembling eternity.
My friends have no faces,
women are what they were so many years ago,
these corners could be other corners,
there are no letters on the pages of books.
All this should frighten me,
but it is a sweetness, a return.
Of the generations of texts on earth
I will have read only a few–
the ones that I keep reading in my memory,
reading and transforming.
From South, East, West, and North
the paths converge that have led me
to my secret center.
Those paths were echoes and footsteps,
women, men, death-throes, resurrections,
days and nights,
dreams and half-wakeful dreams,
every inmost moment of yesterday
and all the yesterdays of the world,
the Dane’s staunch sword and the Persian’s moon,
the acts of the dead,
shared love, and words,
Emerson and snow, so many things.
Now I can forget them. I reach my center,
my algebra and my key,
my mirror.
Soon I will know who I am.

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Translation: Hoyt Rogers