The MOMA exhibition is now in spain at the Museo Reina Sofía. The works of Mira Schendel (born in Switzerland in 1919 - died in São Paulo in 1988) and León Ferrari (born in Argentina in 1920) have found their principal visual source in language as both writing and gesture, that is, as both verbally intelligible and purely visible matter.

Even at its most silent, intimate moments, their art is imbued with the protean tumult of language’s countless faces and incarnations, from voluntary silence to aphasia, passing along the way through whisper, prayer, accusation, sermon, dialogue, quotation, stutter, shout, onomatopoeia, collage, argument, alphabet, and poetry. Both artists knew poets well—Haroldo de Campos in the case of Schendel, Rafael Alberti in that of Ferrari—and both at one time or another were poets themselves.

The early 1960s were crucial years in the development of Schendel’s and Ferrari’s work—that is, in its materialization of new and different forms—and 1964 in particular seems to have brought both artists to turning points. That was the year of Ferrari’s Cuadro escrito (Written painting), 1964, which followed a period of intense focus on drawing that led him first to the abstraction of deformed, illegible writing, then to the sophisticated but no less hermetic calligraphy of his written drawings. That same year, Schendel embarked on a phase of her practice exclusively dedicated to works on paper, specifically rectangular sheets of the Japanese paper often called rice paper. To make her drawings of this period—around two thousand of them— she used a self-invented technique, her own in both the application of the ink and the actual physical gesture. The period ended toward the late 1960s with the creation of her most emblematic objects: the Droguinhas (Little nothings), 1968-73, Trenzinho (Little train), 1965, and the Objetos gráficos (Graphic Objects), 1968-73.

In North America and Europe, these years also saw the emergence of an art form that used no single medium, or at least that could not be understood from the perspective of the qualities of a single medium or material. Instead, as Sol LeWitt wrote, this was an art form in which “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.” From the start, the critical writing on this work—Conceptual art—developed what would prove to be one of its essential myths, the dematerialization of the art object assumed to be implicit in it.

While language as an ideal vector of meaning is a central “aspect” of the Conceptualists’ art, Ferrari and Schendel are concerned with the “aspect” of language in the sense of its visual appearance. The works of Ferrari and Schendel describe an ingrown, interconnected language, a written materiality, language as a trembling of the hand, a shudder of the body—language that itself has shuddered, a language that voices an idiosyncratic, irreplaceable subject. Of course their art involves ideas and concepts, indeed, often, ideas and concepts in their barest state, an obstinately repetitive plundering of barely legible names, words, fictions, definitions, locutions. But these things are depicted in a physical circumstance, where the materiality of signs and symbols resonates like a dissonant, distorting echo of the ideal and perhaps fictional purity of the mind and of ideas.

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