What does it mean to map something unmeasurable?

Intimate Topographies brings together the work of Laura Castro, Andrea Grau, and José Herrera—three artists whose practices explore emotions, perception and memory through abstraction, photomontage, and experimental material processes.

Rather than an exhibition of literal geographies or place-based narratives, Topografías íntimas proposes a subtler terrain—one in which personal memory, cultural inheritance, and aesthetic intuition intersect. As Brazilian theorist Suely Rolnik suggests, affect and memory create their own cartographies—maps not drawn in coordinates, but in gesture, feeling, and rupture. These topographies emerge when the body remains open to the world—when perception itself becomes a site of resistance.

In Andrea Grau’s gestural abstractions, we encounter a personal and emotional terrain—works that emerge through intuition and vulnerability. Her paintings evoke the sensation of moving through one’s own psychic weather, charting the outlines of inner change.

José Herrera’s digitally constructed photomontages directly engage with historical and geographic disruption. By reconfiguring archival imagery, monumental architecture, and pre-Columbian iconography, he stages speculative encounters that collapse timelines and geographies. These altered landscapes raise questions about historical visibility, memory, and what becomes buried—or unearthed—within the image.

Laura Castro approaches abstraction as a form of geological and bodily excavation. Her surfaces—built through accumulation, subtraction, and raw material transformation—suggest landscapes shaped by movement, erosion, and emotional sediment. The resulting forms feel at once personal and environmental: unfixed, yet grounded.

Together, the works in Topografías íntimas suggest that to make art is to map: to draw out the spaces between self and world, between presence and absence, between what is remembered and what resists being known.

Bibliography

Rolnik, Suely. Cartografia Sentimental: Transformações contemporâneas do desejo. Porto Alegre: Editora Sulina / Editora da UFRGS, 1989.

Rolnik, Suely, and Félix Guattari. Micropolitics: Cartographies of Desire. Translated by K. Clark. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007.

Rolnik, Suely. “The Geopolitics of Pimping.” Documenta 12 Magazines, 2007.