While Apple’s geolocation software recently “lost” two users in the middle of the Australian desert and China announced that it will begin a satellite counteroffensive, proposing an alternative to the American GPS hegemony by 2020, our everyday relationship to cartography is rapidly deteriorating and the connection between territory and its mapping is increasingly eroding. Supplanted by Google’s satellite zoom, the map is also being overtaken by the same software’s “street view,” which spares users the trouble of traveling on the ground. It is as though Art & Language’s conceptual exercises, notably those seeking to isolate American States on a blank page (Map not to indicate…, 1967) had anticipated the current territorial dematerialization.

Since the end of the 1990s, David Renaud, a forty-year old French artist, has developed a sculptural practice of cartography that generates a concrete experience for viewers, who are more accustomed to planar observations in this field. In fact, in order to introduce Renaud’s approach one could draw up a long genealogy of cartographer, geographer and also topographer artists, who tend, for the most part, to limit themselves to the map’s original characteristic: its two-dimensionality. Though this artist does not escape this atavism, for he himself retouches maps and engages in graphic and pictorial games, the way in which he works with our relationship to scale and volumetry alters viewers’ readings by involving them in an attentive, even prudent, surveying; in an in vitro exploration of the world of geography and its cartographic attire.

Îles

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