The vaguely calligraphic lines that comprise León Ferrari’s “written drawings” seem to vibrate with an internal energy. The title P4CD stands for peón cuatro caballo dama (pawn to queen’s knight four), corresponding to a move in a chess game written in standard chess notation. Like Marcel Duchamp before him, Ferrari zeroes in on the particular intersection of verbal and abstract thought that the game involves. In this and other works, Ferrari collapses the distinction between seeing and reading, prompting a kind of oscillation, at the level of cognition, between the decipherment of what appears to be a coded language and the aesthetic perception of abstract imagery. The cryptic aspect of this image corresponds to his interest in the mental operations involved in processing texts written in an unfamiliar language; here, this function is slowed down, suspended. 
Identification
Title
P4CD
Production Date
1979
Object Number
2016.330
Credit Line
Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, acquired from The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Gift of Ruth and Marvin A. Sackner and the Sackner Family Partnership
Copyright
© León Ferrari. Courtesy Fundación Ferrari
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Physical Qualities
Medium
Ink, Letraset, and paper collage
Dimensions
13 x 8 3/8 inches
Visual Description
P4CD by artist León Ferrari is an Ink, Letraset, and paper collage made in 1982. It measures approximately thirteen by almost eight inches, and is hung in portrait orientation, meaning its shortest side runs parallel to the floor. The composition of this ink and paper artwork is similar to a handwritten letter on unlined paper. Twelve rows of medium sized calligraphic lines in an array of symbols and letters fill the page. All are in black against a white paper surface, and are surrounded by narrow margins. With their dips, loops, and diagonal curves, these scratchy lines resemble letters but are in fact unintelligible. One’s written language of origin most likely dictates how this artwork is viewed, whether from left to right or right to left. Letters that we can recognize are scattered throughout this mysterious written language in a selection of fonts and sizes. However, they are facing various directions and are in different sizes, giving them an appearance of an enigmatic secret code rather than a text that someone could read. Sprinkled throughout the rows of enigmatic calligraphy are typographic symbols such as flowers, dice, a four-leaf clover, a spade, chess pieces, music notes, and a heart. These symbols tuck in tightly around their surrounding letters.
León Ferrari
León Ferrari — b. 1920, Buenos Aires; d. 2013, Buenos Aires
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