Horacio Zabala at 11×7

At the recent opening of Horacio Zabala’s excellent show, Otras cartografías / Obras 1972 -1975 (Other Maps / Works 1972 – 1975), I learned that I am, in fact, still a wimp–at least when it comes to approaching famous artists I’ve long wanted to interview. Here’s what I wrote about it for Juanele:

I’m a cartophile. I can lose myself for hours on Google Maps, and my bedroom walls are papered with schematics of some of the places I love most. Maybe Horacio Zabala’s are, too. At the very least, the pieces featured in 11×7’s exhibit of his work, Otras cartografías / Obras 1972 -1975 (Other Maps / Works 1972 – 1975), make it clear that Zabala has both something to say and the tools to say it cartographically.

The opening itself was a cultural experience, its onda quite a departure from the typical vibe at the edgier, less-establishment galleries where I most often find myself. That much I could have concluded from the neighborhood alone. Half a block from Patio Bullrich (where one can spend 100 pesos on two coffees and an apple bar, as I discovered firsthand one pecuniarily painful afternoon), 11×7’s located smack at the epicenter of porteño Old Money.

Marta amid the maps

Sure enough, past the tuxedoed waiter with a tray of wineglasses balanced on one palm, the gallery was packed nearly wall-to-wall with the exquisitely dressed and the important-looking. Even Marta Minujín was there, her Andy-Warhol-blond hair and giant sunglasses all-but-impossible to ignore. (I desperately wanted to talk to her, but, seeing no break in her conversation, I wimped out.)

With the gallery so crowded—and the majority of the patrons deep in conversation right in front of the art—it took some maneuvering to see the works themselves. When I did manage to squeeze my way to the front, though, I was like a kid in a candy shop; the very sight of such well-crafted and well-conceived cartography had me smiling broadly.

No doubt, Zabala’s works could be read on a political level; it’s hard not to hear political overtones in a series of Argentine maps, layered one atop the other, each with a larger hole burned into its center than the one below—especially one like Seis imagenes del fragmento 30, created as the country was tearing itself apart in 1973.Visually devouring the works, however, I was struck most not by Zabala’s message but by his precision, by the mastery of geographic form evident in his simultaneously fanciful and plausible Deformaciones y hundamientos I-IV, and by the studied irreverence of Aparaciones/desaparaciones (a) – (f), carefully plotted on sturdy, lined pages torn from a student’s notebook. Zabala might have been building his own world, but he was willing to do so within the constraints of cartographic practice. And I was more than happy to indulge.