PRAISE FOR MAPS

We wouldn’t know how to live without maps. We would feel like we were in the middle of nowhere. Maps are a way of representing the world, of making sense of it. They show us where we are and where we want to go. More than their abbreviated copy, they are mediators, a space for dialogue between the outside world and the inside. Maps allow us to travel mentally through space. They are open to the reader’s collaboration: “Through an inevitable association of ideas and superimposition of images, we automatically fill in what is missing with our thoughts,” says Luigi Ghirri. Every journey is a journey through oneself.

Lluc Margrau’s cartographies do not evoke distant or exotic worlds, but rather the world closest to us, the territory we inhabit and travel through. Through the interplay of space and time, the artist explores the confrontation between the immediate environment and its different contexts, which necessarily influence the process.

The work that opens the exhibition, “Human Cartographies”, was created after a feeling of foreignness, of dislocation. It was the first fruit of this project, which in a way constitutes the visual chronicle of the itinerary followed in order to orientate oneself. Using the cartographic codes and coordinates of the cities where he has since lived, the artist reconstructs the heterodox geography of this journey. For most of us, the city is our natural habitat. In ‘Urban Archaeologies’, two works created as a result of the artist’s stay in the North American city of Utica, the city is presented as a fragmentary and shifting scenario, a superimposition of cities. Both works start from a simple structure based on modules that can be reformulated by the viewer. Are cities – they seem to suggest – nothing more than the traces that their inhabitants have rewritten over time on other traces?

To map the domestic space, the most intimate and familiar, means to look at it from a different perspective, to understand it and to understand oneself better. The 3 pieces that make up the “Atlas” series respond to this purpose. Placed in space, they play with both the forms and the void they delimit in order to capture the visual breath of the house, the place where, according to Pliny, “the heart lives”, its essential truth.

The works in the exhibition require the viewer’s participation in order to achieve their full meaning. In some the interaction is through the manipulation of the works, in others it is in the movement of the viewer in contemplating them. The latter, in its automatic passage through the space, generates its own cartography and makes it its own. Light is an essential part of the methacrylate and embossed paper engravings. With its ally, the shadow, it draws an ambiguous and unstable reality. It distorts shapes, creates voids, blurs points of reference, makes us doubt whether we are perceiving reality or its shadow, or makes us wonder about the status of the latter. In short, it reminds us of the misleading nature of maps. We already know that maps are the appearance of the world, i.e. a lie. But we need their lies, like those of art, to make the world credible. So that they give us a little truth that gives us shelter.

Toni Picazo