La Joven Noche (The Young Night)

Leon Ferrari was one of the most significant Latin American artists of the 20th century. He was one of the leaders of the international Conceptual Art movement, working in a wide range of media to create works that often explored Catholic imagery. He won the Golden Lion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, and his work has been collected by institutions ranging from Tate to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ferrari created La Joven Noche (The Young Night) in 2000 as part of his ‘Brailles series’, a number of works initially inspired by the love poetry Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who was blind from the age of 55. Ferrari presented Borges's love poetry in braille superimposed on images of nude women, so that viewers would have to 'caress the woman in order to read what the poem says'. La Joven Noche was inspired by Borges's poem of the same name, written a year before the writer’s death, in which Borges describes coming to terms with his blindness. The poem is overlaid in both braille and calligraphy, recalling Ferrari's earlier calligraphic works.