TRANSPARENT TERRITORY – In his dizzying new series of maps for groundlessness, Gerhard Marx continues his investigations into the formal and fictive possibilities of perspective. Rupturing the flat surface of the map, he removes the illusion of solid ground and replaces it with a hovering, vertigo-inducing sense of uncertainty. The shape and notion of ‘the frame’ recurs in several mise-en-abymesequences across the works. Stacked in recurring configurations, its rectangular form has been bent into a series of optical riddles or Escherian landscapes.

When Marx cuts into the map it is a kind of violation – an act of violence against the institutions and processes of global modernity through which the world was filtered to him. That violence is present in the energy of dispersion, ruination and collapse that ripples through the fragmented surfaces of these works. But the story does not end with deconstruction. Offsetting it is the meditative, embodied practice of reconstitution. In constructing his drawings from the ‘found lines’ of decommissioned and discarded maps, Marx displaces the scientific authority of cartography with the subjective impulse of calligraphy.

To some extent, his map drawings call to mind mounting tensions within South Africa in relation to the land – the pain of dispossession, rage due to the slow pace of redistribution, anxiety around the threat of violent land grabs – all bound up in a shifting network of inherited lines and limits that divide the land into territory, domain and jurisdiction. But the works in this series are not only constituted of South African maps. They are random amalgamations of fragments of Europe (many of the original maps referred to the First World War) and Africa, and in piecing them together he conflates space and historical time (some are recent maps, whereas some date back to the early 20th century) into what he thinks of as ‘migrant maps’.

Directly referencing the the kind of makeshift, hybridised vessels we’ve witnessed people resorting to in the current migration crises of Europe, several of the works in this series have a raft-like look about them – temporary, floating, drifting between land(s) and territories. Hovering against a plane of deep opaque blackness, Marx’s reconstructed rafts/crafts transmit a sense of disorientation that is simultaneously disquieting and liberating. There is that vertiginous sci-fi sense of being cut loose from the mother ship to float indefinitely through all space and time, but also an ecstatic sense of possibility in being released from the grip of inherited systems of knowledge, measurement, power and control. – Alexandra Dodd

Ocean Crossing, 2019
Reconfigured Map fragments on Acrylic-Polyurethane Ground and Canvas
60 x 50cm

Triplicate, 2018
Reconfigured Map fragments on Acrylic-Polyurethane Ground and Canvas
70 x 90cm

Room, 2018
Reconfigured Map fragments on Acrylic-Polyurethane Ground and Canvas
50 x 60cm

Crossing, 2017
Reconfigured Map fragments on Acrylic-Polyurethane Ground and Canvas
70 x 90cm

Dwell, 2018
Cut and Reconstituted Map Fragments on Acrylic Ground and Canvas
120 x 120cm

Echo, 2018
Reconfigured Map fragments on Acrylic-Polyurethane Ground and Canvas
30 x 30cm

Five Holes in the Same Place, 2018
Cut and Reconstituted Map Fragments on Acrylic Ground and Canvas
120 x 120cm

Landscape Study, 2018
Reconfigured Map Fragments on Acrylic-Polyurethane Ground and Canvas
140 x 180cm

Migrant, 2018
Reconfigured Map Fragments on Acrylic-Polyurethane Ground and Canvas
180 x 220cm

Ocean Crossing, 2018
Reconfigured Map Fragments on Acrylic-Polyurethane Ground and Canvas
140 x 180cm

Antaeus In Mid-Air, 2018
Reconfigured Map fragments on Acrylic-Polyurethane Ground and Canvas
180 x 220cm

Circumscription, 2017
Cut and Reconstituted Map Fragments on Acrylic ground and canvas
180 x 240cm

Plot, 2017
Cut and Reconstituted Map Fragments on Acrylic ground and canvas
180 x 140cm

Transparent (Layering), 2017
Cut and Reconstituted Map Fragments on Acrylic ground and canvas

Circumscription, 2017
Cut and Reconstituted Map fragments on canvas and acrylic ground
240 x180cm

Slippage, 2017
Cut and Reconstituted Map Fragments on Acrylic ground with canvass and wooden substrate
120 x 120cm

Transparent (Swivel), 2017
Cut and Reconstituted Map Fragments on Acrylic ground and canvas

Landslide, 2017
Cut and Reconstituted Map Fragments on Acrylic ground and canvas
180 x 140cm

Reiteration (Transparent Territory), 2016
Cut and reconstituted map fragments and acrylic ground on canvas
180 x 120cm

A Small Escalating Refrain (Transparent Territory), 2016
Cut and reconstituted map fragments and acrylic ground on canvas
45 x 45cm

A Small Reiteration (Transparent Territory), 2016
Cut and reconstituted map fragments and acrylic ground on canvas
45 x 45cm

Transparent Territory, Perpetual Proximity, 2016
Cut and reconstituted map fragments and acrylic ground on canvas
100 x 100cm

Transparent Territory 2, 2016
Cut and reconstituted Map Fragments
70 x 70cm

Transparent Territory 3, 2016
Cut and reconstituted Map Fragments
70 x 70cm

Transparent Territory 1, 2016
Cut and reconstituted Map Fragments
85 x 85cm