Art: Ferrer: A Voyage with Salsa

In the eyes of his admirers, Rafael Ferrer’s art has come to represent Puerto Rico, rather as the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez stand for Colombia. Certainly, Ferrer—now 44, and having his latest one-man show at Manhattan’s Nancy Hoffman Gallery—has not yet produced his masterpiece, his Hundred Years of Solitude. But if any Latin American artist of his generation is likely to, it is he.

Throughout the ’70s his work—painting, sculpture and cockeyed hybrid —has provided a winding, mythic narrative about travel and exploration, circling back on a landscape choked with color and crammed with eccentric heroes. Each new show provides a fresh chapter. Ferrer’s sources are often literary: Pigafetta’s chronicle of Magellan’s explorations, for instance. His materials are a parade of incongruities —neon tubes and stuffed anacondas, old dinghies and melting ice, dry leaves and wild-dog skins, plastic roses, canoes made of rusty wire, maps that turn into masks, and drums, beads, burlap.

Hot and Loose. Ferrer’s imagery has always been audacious and aggressive; its colors are about as subtle as the parlor of a San Juan cathouse. But its ambition is unshakable, even obsessive: to render an account of exotic travel as refracted through a Puerto Rican background and an ironic, modernist education. As his best exegete, Art Critic Carter Ratcliff, points out, “It is as a practitioner of a dramatic, restless, ‘tropical’ version of the sublime that Ferrer can best be understood.” The work is hot salsa too, theatrical and loose. In his way, Rafi—as his buddies call him —is the ham his elder brother, Actor Jose Ferrer, chose not to become.

A wiry, intense man with a head like a parchment-covered cannon ball and a passion for skin diving, Ferrer was born in Santurce, P.R., in 1933. In New York City in his early twenties, he supported himself as a drummer with bands in Spanish Harlem. Cuban music, he recalls, gave him “the ability to bring out the tropical, primitive, emotional conditions of one’s roots into the open, and to rejoice in their messiness and to be … proud of their contradictions.”

This did not show in his art at first.

Ferrer’s breakthrough did not come until the late ’60s, but then there was no restraining him. He turned into a passionately regional artist: “I saw the North American Giant as tired, bleeding from excesses which were never meant to produce pleasures except perhaps those of a puritanical order, foreign and strange.”

The pleasures of Ferrer’s new work are by no means puritanical. They are florid souvenirs de voyage —in some cases, of an imaginary Africa—in the form of tents. The tents are not habitable. One, entitled Sudan, has no entrance; the gloomy space inside is occupied by a stuffed toucan on a perch, eerie blue in the half-light. The accessible space in Sahara, for all the breadth of the piece, is a small womblike pocket. La Luna and Asia Solo can not be entered at all. They are not so much environments, therefore, as three-dimensional paintings, and their subject is landscape: moons and sand, licorice-colored skies, cave darkness, vines.

It is as though the supposed travels of these tents, over plains and dunes, had gaudily stained the canvas with memory; the fabric develops what it wit nessed, like a Polaroid photo. They also suggest sideshow tents — bright, tacky signs advertising freaks and marvels. As the British Empire’s cartographers once colored half the world red, Ferrer is busy coloring it Puerto Rican, smeared with acid-drop colors, scrawled with looping graffiti. There are few artists of this energy at work today.