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until 20.06. | #5010ARTatBerlin | Luisa Catucci Contemporary shows from Friday, 1. May 2026 (Opening: 30.04.) the exhibition Dystopic Cartography by the artist Pablo Griss.
There are maps that tell you where you are.
And then there are maps that politely refuse to do so.
Pablo Griss draws the latter.
Dystopic Cartography is the latest series of works by the Venezuelan artist Pablo Griss, developed over the last three years – the result of a long process of reflection, reorientation and, perhaps, a necessary act of defiance.
Griss was once known for an almost obsessive control. His earlier works functioned with the precision of finely calibrated instruments: compositions inspired by energetic and magnetic fields, deeply rooted in the Venezuelan tradition of Op Art. In this universe, color behaved. It had a function. It served the optical effect, the visual vibration, the exact logic of perception. Everything was measured, intentional, closed.
And then something shifted.
This new series doesn’t abandon this past—it disrupts it. The same hand is still recognizable in the discipline of certain lines, in the structural frameworks that support the compositions like architectural skeletons. But these structures are under pressure. The system is no longer hermetic.
The color no longer obeys.
It collides, bleeds, interrupts. Brushstrokes accelerate, hesitate, lash out. Pigment drips where it would once have been corrected. What was once controlled now flirts with excess. What was once dissolved remains in tension.
A release emerges—unmistakably—something closer to urgency, perhaps even to rage. Not chaos for its own sake, but a force that insists on penetrating the image.
His paintings begin like well-behaved cities: grids, bands, chromatic architectures that promise orientation, direction, perhaps even a sense of certainty. But beware. Something always goes wrong—in a wonderful, inevitable way. A line rebels. A color escapes. Geometry, that old control freak, begins to sweat.
What you see here is not a system. It is a system trying to hold itself together while the universe quietly smiles about it.
Griss stages a slow disintegration of order. Not a catastrophe with sirens and headlines, but an intimate dissolution: structure eroding from within, logic interrupted by impulse, clarity complicated by sensation. His compositions begin like arguments—and end like conversations at three in the morning.
Color here is not decorative. It is not polite. It does not sit still in its assigned place. It expands, withdraws, seduces, contradicts. It behaves like weather—changeable, relational, impossible to isolate. Somewhere in the background, Josef Albers nods in agreement: Color never exists alone; it always arises in relationship.
And yet – despite the grids and bands – these images breathe. They pulsate. They seem less constructed than organic – like strange ecosystems or landscapes after the end of certainty. One thinks one recognizes ruins, horizons, or the afterimages of something corporeal, something almost memorable. Echoes appear and disappear again: a trace that might have escaped from Francis Bacon’s studio, a veil that slipped from Gerhard Richter’s grasp on a distracted afternoon.
But these are not quotes. They are hauntings.
Something else emerges in the fractures—something that defies naming. A presence without a clear face. A territory without coordinates. Philosophers might think here of Immanuel Kant and his persistent “thing-in-itself”—that unattainable core of reality that eludes perception. Griss doesn’t illustrate it. He circles it. He grazes it. He allows it to flicker in the cracks, where order fails.
For this is the unspoken truth of dystopic cartography: the world cannot be fully mapped. Not by lines, not by color, not even by the persistent human desire to order everything.
And yet – we try.
We build structures. We set rhythms. We draw boundaries where everything has long since merged. Griss acknowledges this attempt while simultaneously deconstructing it. His paintings are acts of construction and sabotage, discipline and letting go. They exist in a field of tension between geometric abstraction and abstract expressionism, where control and chaos do not cancel each other out, but rather dance together.
The surface tells the story. Layers accumulate like irreversible decisions. Glazes, impastos, smudges, corrections – nothing is hidden, nothing erased. Every trace carries within it time, pressure, hesitation, persistence. The painting remembers everything. It rejects the illusion of perfection and chooses the far more compelling reality of the process.
This is painting as resistance. Against smoothness. Against certainty. Against simplistic meaning.
And so these works do not dissolve. They linger. They vibrate. They deliberately remain unfinished in their attempt to grasp something that always eludes us.
A map, then – one that does not lead to a destination, but to the edge of understanding, where things fall apart just far enough to become visible.
Opening: Thursday, 30. April 2026, 6–9 pm
Exhibition dates: Friday, 1. May until Saturday, 20. June 2026
To the Gallery
Bildunterschrift Titel: Courtesy of Luisa Catucci Contemporary
Exhibition Pablo Griss – Luisa Catucci Contemporary | Zeitgenössische Kunst Berlin – Contemporary Art – Exhibitons | ART at Berlin
