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Fleeing the military dictatorship in his native country in 1976, the artist took refuge in Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was there that he made his first heliographies. These multiples on paper use architectural modeling to represent deliberately unreal city plans and fake, proliferating, and at times absurd architectonic structures. Other times, the lines render, at a more basic level, patterns of mass behavior. Beneath their playful and mesmerizing surface, Ferraris works are metaphors for an over-organized, over-determined world, unmasking the highly structured and potentially oppressive and aporetic character of modern city planning. The streams of cars or people symbolize the reification of city dwellers transformed into robots or urban furniture. Surface graphic functionalism turns into ornament. One could go further and discern in these representations, modeled on uniformization and organization, a metaphorical relation to a military order. City planning, cartography, scale models, and more generally a birds-eye view of the world, were developed for strategic, military, and war purposes. A generalized policy of gaze and knowledge in the service of the logic of domination and conquest. The carte détat major (lit. military staff map) which is in use to this day, is one of the vestiges of that logic. Consequently, this organized, yet arbitrary vision evokes a sort of functional authoritarianism characteristic of military regimes which, as one can easily imagine, had a great impact on the artist. However, besides being politically engaged, the heliographies also function as mental architectures representing, through the motif of the labyrinth, psychic meanders, dead-ends, and short-cuts. Depending on the distance of the gaze, the entomologizing sociological vision appears either abstract or figurative, reassuring or dizzying, uniform or chaotic. Although produced in the 1970s, the heliographies are, once again, surprisingly current in that they offer the image and the experience of a contemporary world apprehended as vertigo, chaos, incomprehension, and meaningless order.
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