What's Hidden Inside Angela Ferrari's Post-Human Landscapes?
"I want to create a painting so exquisite that the viewer will want to eat it, and that will, at the same time, devour the viewer." Argentine artist Angela Ferrari sits in her pictorial installation “If They Smell Your Fear, They Will Bite You”, near an immense canvas depicting a hunting scene. Ferrari's strawberry-blond hair harmonizes with the earthy color palette of the painting, setting off the muted tawny tone of a cliff where a wild boar rolls on her back, attacked by hunting dogs. The struggle is situated within a grotesque tangle of natural elements, superimposed upon each other and depicted with an otherworldly luminosity which heightens the surreal ambiguity of the scene. The dogs are captured in their weightless pursuit of the hog, surrounded by her offspring, which appear tragically vulnerable in comparison with their mother.
"If I painted a hare, we would already know the outcome — it would be unlikely to escape from the pack of dogs. However, the wild boar is depicted at so large a scale that it gives us hope that the animal may survive."
Playing with scale and proportions, Ferrari builds a dramatic tension that transcends the canvas, filling the space with unease. The hog’s gargantuan size and central position within the painting act as a focal point, giving cohesion to a composition rich in visual elements. However, despite the multitude of living creatures inhabiting Ferrari’s paintings, the landscape consistently emerges as the protagonist of her narratives. Often presented as idiosyncratic tapestries of environments, merging into each other like patches on a quilt, her landscapes echo traditional genres of European painting in their meticulous attention to detail. However, the classical references found in these landscapes are not a homage to painting traditions, but rather a rebellion against them.
Angela Ferrari's fascination with hunting scenes was sparked upon her arrival in Mexico several years ago. Driven by her search for tools to articulate the alienation she experienced as an outsider, her physical and political existence now situated within a different cultural framework, the canvas became a territory for exploring the possibilities of new identities and expressing the anxieties related to this liminal condition.
The tension is almost palpable in the series presented for the first edition of culto collecta’s curatorial project, “Endémica”. Rendered in graphite on paper, these drawings depict hunting scenes set amidst metaphysical landscapes, characterized by an undefined temporality and the elusive spatial logic of a dream. Skewed perspectives give rise to nauseating compositions in which architectural elements overlay dead or dying natural forms, executed with painstaking precision. Animals are portrayed in twisted, unnatural poses, either paralyzed by fear or floating in space. Their bodies, distorted against the absurdist panoramas of fragmented scenery, appear deflated and empty as if their corporality were a costume. Feathers and dry flowers are present in almost every work of the series, filling the drawings with the melancholic gentleness of decay. By portraying plants found on the streets of Mexico City and Buenos Aires, Ferrari establishes a relationship with her environment, adding personal slant to these timeless dreamscapes. Thus, two surrealities — that of her native land and that of her adopted home — collide, becoming a new symbolic terrain to explore.
Imbued with a unique spatial sensibility, the sceneries devised by Angela Ferrari diverge from the norms of orthogonal space we are historically accustomed to. The artist reimagines the architectural structure of her paintings by experimenting with curvilinear forms that exude a strong organic quality in their lines, mirroring the fluidity of bodily shapes. Reminiscent of nests or uteruses, these settings gently envelop the body in their smooth, sinuous geometries, mimicking the curvature of a stage, and thus becoming increasingly theatrical and explicit.
"I believe that just as there is no neutral body, there is no neutral landscape. Every landscape is politicized, has a history, and can be seen as a resource or territory to be conquered."
The landscape in Ferrari’s paintings is indeed post-human, filled with hints that the apparent wilderness is in fact domesticated and colonized. The passive presence of human beings electrifies the scenery with an eerie silence, in the midst of which the viewer can hear the sound of the sliced apple rolling down the cliff, the jingle of metal tags on leather dog collars, and the murmur of hunters' voices echoing somewhere in the distance. This alienation of nature manifests itself in scenes of interspecies violence that wouldn’t normally occur in the wild. Painting an environment perpetuated by humans allows the artist to explore basic power dynamics: hunting dogs are bred and trained to attack wild animals as a form of bourgeois leisure. The domesticated landscape exposes the cruel reality of anthropocentrism, which, along with other forms of supremacy such as colonialism and patriarchy, imposes values that benefit only a few select groups, leaving the rest at a dangerous disadvantage.
This disregard for pre-existing conditions of life highlights how humans act as masters, determining which species deserve to live and which ones are condemned to die. The wild boar from "If They Smell Your Fear, They’ll Bite You" appears in an even larger painting titled "Blood and Dust," showcased in Angela Ferrari’s ongoing solo exposition "Vertigo" at Angstroms gallery. The allegorical imagery of the hog and the purebred dogs illustrates the dichotomy of civilization versus savagery, raising questions about the nature of morality established by society. This contrast readily extends beyond the canvas to the power dynamics outside the gallery, where those who consider themselves more civilized perpetrate barbaric violence against groups labeled as 'savages', employing the same tactic: dehumanization, which automatically excuses acts of violence by portraying them as necessary.
The choice of the hunting theme is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, portraying brutal scenes replicates violence, but at the same time the use of common symbolic elements and the traditional pictorial language inherent to the genre allows Ferrari to engage the audience in uncomfortable conversations, while narrowing the distance between the artwork and the viewer. From within the fictional biome, the spectator can experience the painting from a less passive position, as a participant in the space. Lured by mesmerizing details on the canvas, we get trapped inside Ferrari’s pictorial installations — the hunting metaphor expands. Within these carnivorous narratives, the hunter becomes the hunted, and the spectator is devoured by ambiguous landscapes that blur the limits of fiction, invading and warping the reality of the physical space they inhabit.
Traducción por Hellène Aligant @operadores_suaves
