ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some of the main operational modes of mapping (planarity, tracing, assemblage, rhizome, etc.) and contextualizes them by way of artworks in which these creative methodologies are deployed and translated in artistic practices. Diagrams and paintings by Walter Benjamin, Gastone Novelli, and Julie Mehretu are analyzed in relation to keywords such as “archive,” “diagram,” “trace,” and “figure.” Deleuze, Freud, and Derrida are some of the thinkers who contribute to the interpretation of artistic practices that rely on the “cartographic” as a mode of generating images, and even as a painting style.
Our central task, then, is to demonstrate how these particular artworks do not function as representation or illustration of an idea, but as hermeneutic interpretation in their own right, and that they do so through cartographic processes. This leads to the concept of a “carto-aesthetics,” where formal and processual elements related to mapping become part of contemporary art idioms and practices.
