You only have to see a couple of paintings by Rafael Ferrer before wondering why he had to wait until this terrific retrospective at El Museo del Barrio to get the full, great artist treatment. With 100 complex and beautiful works, the exhibit spans more than 50 years of the artist’s career and includes collage, sculpture, painting, drawing, photography and mixed media. Although acclaimed by critics and collected by the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA and other major institutions, he somehow never caught the spotlight. Now it’s his.
“I believe people didn’t know how to pigeonhole Rafael,” explains Deborah Cullen, the museum’s director of curatorial programs, who curated this traveling retrospective. “It’s as if he were too much to take in. There is a great, aggressive joy and humanist passion in his prolific image making. All his passions flood into his work. He’s a restless intellectual, who never settles into one artistic mode of expression.”
Rafael Ferrer’s “Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials,” Whitney Musesum (1969). Courtesy of Rafael Ferrer.
Ferrer, who was born in Puerto Rico in 1933, takes his belated recognition in stride. “I have always gone against the grain,” he says. “I give the advice: ‘Bite the hand that feeds you.’ It’s the only way to be true to yourself.”
In his first exhibitions in Puerto Rico beginning in 1961, Ferrer showed collages with sexy pin-ups, mousetraps and abstract painted passages, as well as welded and assembled fictional characters made of scrap metal. After moving to the continental United States in 1966, he began working with raw, natural materials—such as leaves, hay, peat moss, water, ice and grease—as well as industrial elements, like telephone poles, chain-link fencing, ladders and buckets.
Later Ferrer drew exotic locations and strange faces on navigational charts and explored figurative work, with powerful scenes of Caribbean villages that show the result of oppression. A great lover of language, and fluent in two, he has long incorporated words and phrases in his works.
“Ferrer’s imagination gently overflows historical, cultural and artistic boundaries or sweeps through them,” wrote the critic Carter Ratcliff in an essay in the exhibition catalog, “allowing itself to be deflected only if deflection will focus its power.”
A world traveler, Ferrer now works at his home on Long Island, surrounded by water. It fills his island needs and allows him to go out in his kayak every day. “My life and my education are inextricably linked to two diametrically different cultures,” he says, “and this marks in a profound way everything that I have done. This may explain my nonconformist nature. I simply don’t fit in. Never have, never will.”
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Retro/Active: The Work of Rafael Ferrer. Through Aug. 22, El Museo del Barrio, 1230 5th Ave., 212-831-7272.
