Dystopian Cartography

Dystopian Cartography, with a vernissage on April 30 and the official opening on May 1 at Luisa Catucci Contemporary during Gallery Weekend Berlin, presents Venezuelan artist Pablo Griss’s new body of work developed over three years.

There are maps that tell you where you are. And then there are maps that politely refuse. Pablo Griss draws the second kind. Dystopian Cartography is the latest body of work by the Venezuelan artist Pablo Griss, developed over the past three years through a process that was anything but immediate. It emerges after a long period of reflection, recalibration, and—perhaps—necessary disobedience. Griss was once known for a near-obsessive control. His earlier works operated with the precision of calibrated instruments, compositions inspired by energetic and magnetic fields, deeply rooted in the Venezuelan tradition of optical art. In that universe, color behaved. It had a job to do. It served the retinal effect, the visual vibration, the exacting logic of perception. Everything was measured, intentional, contained. And then something shifted. This new series doesn’t abandon that past—it disrupts it. You can still recognize the same hand in the discipline of certain lines, in the skeletal remains of structure that hold the compositions together like architectural bones. But now those bones are under pressure. The system is no longer airtight. Color no longer obeys. It collides, bleeds, interrupts. Brushstrokes accelerate, hesitate, lash out. Pigment drips where once it would have been corrected. What was once controlled now flirts with excess. What was once resolved now lingers in tension. There is, unmistakably, a release—something closer to urgency, even rage. Not chaos for its own sake, but a force that insists on entering the frame. His paintings begin like well-behaved cities: grids, bands, chromatic architectures that seem to promise orientation, direction, maybe even a touch of certainty. But don’t get comfortable. Something always goes wrong — gloriously, inevitably wrong. A streak rebels. A color slips its leash. Geometry, that old control freak, starts sweating. What you are looking at is not a system. It is a system trying to hold itself together while the universe gently laughs. Griss stages a slow-motion collapse of order. Not a catastrophe with sirens and headlines, but a more intimate undoing: structure eroded from within by gesture, logic interrupted by impulse, clarity complicated by sensation. His compositions are built like arguments and then interrupted like conversations at 3 a.m. Color here is not decorative. It is not polite. It does not sit quietly in its assigned seat. It expands, contracts, seduces, contradicts. It behaves like weather — shifting, relational, impossible to isolate. Somewhere in the background, Josef Albers nods knowingly: color is never alone; it is always becoming something else in the presence of another. And yet, despite the grids and the bands, these paintings breathe. They pulse. They feel less engineered than grown — like strange ecosystems or landscapes after the end of certainty. You might glimpse ruins, horizons, or the afterimage of something bodily, something almost remembered. Echoes drift in and out: a smear that could have wandered out of Francis Bacon’s studio, a veil that might have slipped past Gerhard Richter on a distracted afternoon. But these are not quotations. They are hauntings. In the fractures, something else appears — something that resists naming. A presence without a clear face. A territory without coordinates. Philosophers might whisper about Immanuel Kant and his stubborn “thing in itself,” that unreachable core of reality that refuses to be captured by perception. Griss doesn’t illustrate it. He circles it. He brushes against it. He lets it flicker through the cracks where order fails. Because this is the quiet truth of Dystopian Cartography: the world cannot be fully mapped. Not by lines, not by color, not even by the most stubborn human desire to make sense of things. And yet — we try. We build structures. We impose rhythms. We draw borders in places where everything is already leaking into everything else. Griss honors that effort while simultaneously dismantling it. His paintings are acts of both construction and sabotage, discipline and release. They exist in the charged space between geometric abstraction and abstract expressionism, where control and chaos don’t cancel each other out — they dance. The surface tells the story. Layers accumulate like decisions you can’t quite take back. Glazes, impastos, smears, corrections — nothing is hidden, nothing erased. Every mark carries time, pressure, hesitation, insistence. The painting remembers everything. It refuses the fantasy of perfection and instead embraces the far more interesting reality of process. This is painting as resistance. To smoothness. To certainty. To easy meaning. And so, these works do not resolve. They hover. They vibrate. They remain gloriously unfinished in their attempt to grasp something that will always exceed them. A map, then — but one that leads not to a destination, rather to the edge of understanding, where things fall apart just enough to become visible.

What to expect:
Painting