A collage after León Ferrari

Shania Chinien (2nd year Art History student)

The following collage was produced as part of the Art History 2nd and 3rd year elective HART6690/HART6700 Study of a Single Artist: León Ferrari. In this module we delved into the life and artworks of Leon Ferrari and his response to the dictatorships of Argentina in 1966 and how that influenced the mode of his work. With this collage, we were tasked with creating a collage from images we could find in magazines, which led me to find images in relation to the aesthetics Ferrari used.

For this piece, I wanted to explore parody and irony as the main aspect of portrayal, which is prominent through the juxtaposing, bold text of ‘The Love’ being next to a soldier, who is also next to biblical figures, bringing forth themes of religion and war. I also wanted to display a sense of visual aesthetic by using a balance of bright and monotone colours as well as considering placement of each cut out. I placed ‘The Love’ underneath everything else as I only wanted those two words to be visible and act as a focal point, which is enforced by it being the only text there and I also placed the figure of the man in green with the beret on top to emphasise comedic aspect.
The sense of parody from that figure comes from his body language, hand gesture and contrasting attire to the rest of the images, which I liked and kept the arm to go off the page to bring even more attention to it. I added small pieces of colourful illustration and drapery of material image for no contextual significance but to add texture and I liked how visually pleasing it made it. If I had more time, I would have considered adding more textures and cut out pieces of images in sparser areas and add some more brighter hues to elevate the sense of parody.