Everything possible has been erased, perhaps, but having turned the erasure
into a black construction 'brick', all that remains is to build.
Emilio Isgrò
In the classical world, maps, in addition to their descriptive function, were attributed functions of knowledge and memory; they were maps created to celebrate ideologies, a synthesis of experiences and worldviews.
A symbolic value taken up by 20th century and contemporary artistic cartography: real geographies bent to the reasons of poetics or derived from needs for expression rooted in mythologies and private worlds.
Works that recount real and fantastic worlds, maps born in the artistic scene of the twentieth-century avant-gardes as places of voluntary disorientation or, in the precariousness of fragile existential vicissitudes, as a necessary search for order, for laboriously constructed identities.
Along Balkan routes and Danubian waters, the identity cartographies of Joskin Siljan and Johann Garber; Emilio Isgrò with his maps opened up to new perspectives by masterly "erasures", which exalt words destined to remain, indelible in the memory. Maria Lai, author of a labyrinthine cartography derived from rites and legends of the ancient Sardinian land; the magic of Surrealism in Yves Tanguy's canvas, where dreamlike universes chase each other.
L'Arte inquieta. The urgency of creation
© Copyright 2024