The vaguely calligraphic lines that comprise León Ferrari’s “written drawings” seem to vibrate with an internal energy. In Rey y dama, this undulation takes on a tongue-in-cheek subtext of eroticism by virtue of the central motif of king and queen chess pieces lying in repose on their marital bed. 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.