Contrary to fantasy maps, artistic interpretations of geographic information, have always worked with objective data and augmented it by introducing supplementary information. If we think about the Renaissance’s ‘Civitates Orbis Terrarium’ (1572-1618) or ‘Theatrum Orbis Terrarium’ (1570) – the first modern atlases in which art and science fused – it becomes obvious that the artistic input represents an extension of the factual territory with additional meanings and data (vegetal, animal species).
This pure geography distilled in a square meter shot reminds of the philosophical humour of Lewis Carroll, in his book Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1893), where he described a fictional map that had “the scale of a mile to the mile”. This idea has been appropriated by Jorge Luis Borges’s in On Exactitude in Science (1946) where a map has also the same scale as an entire empire, because of a scientific deformation of a drawn map!
In these paintings, we are presented with bird eye’s views of samples of geographical inscriptions extracted from the territory.
I remember in this context the artistic and performative work of Andre Cadere in 1970’s Paris, who crossed exhibition openings and artistic gatherings, leaving behind his painted sticks. These represented units of measurement and of demarcation of his personal passage, but also a modality to modify and disturb the coherence of the events.
We can think that new (and perpetually adjusted) systems of reference generate not only meaning, but also shape the imaginary. Grids of measuring and delimitation of territory generate a specific vision of geographical materialities, colours and textures. We are met by patterns that are omnipresent: they seem to be essentialized images of large territories, of vegetal configurations, of streets, of an infrastructure of movement, of networks both virtual and concrete. The 1m2 pictural surface absorbs the eye by a perpetual explosion of colours. These colors represent rather movement, than a static reproduction of territorial chromatic reality.
