This essay suggests a reading of the works of Joaquín Torres García (1875–1949) and the contemporary Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger through the lens of their compositional approaches, both of which were related to the field of cartography. The essayist, Annateresa Fabris, claims that the Uruguayan virtuoso artist sought to create a Latin American form of art that transcended the canon of western art, therefore immersing himself in the universal reality of the twentieth century while establishing a selective dialogue with the various western visual languages. Torres García also proposed a different way of looking at the balance of power between northern and southern hemispheres. His inverted map of South America suggested a new perspective in terms of space and politics by reversing the state of dependence from a universalist point of view. Geiger’s work focuses on difference, discontinuity, and displacement, using cartography in a highly symbolic way. According to Fabris, both artists feel entitled to use different artistic ideas within the field of modern art to express an “alternative” point of view.  

This review approaches the work of Joaquín Torres García and Anna Bella Geiger through the prism of cartography in order to show how both artists sought to reintroduce Latin American art into the realm of modern art on an equal footing with other nations. The reviewer, the Brazilian art historian and critic Annateresa Fabris, returns to several of the themes she explored in her earlier readings of these two artists, referring to the opinions expressed by the Franco-Chilean critic Nelly Richard and to Svetlana Alpers’ thoughts on the subject of “cartography.”   

This concept of mapping became somewhat clichéd in the early 1990s, when the market was flooded with countless variations on the theme of cartography, including cartography of time, cartography of history, radical cartography, subversive cartography, etc. One curatorial example of this phenomenon will suffice: the exhibition Cartographies: 14 Artists from Latin America at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (1993), organized by the Brazilian curator Ivo Mesquita. In that exhibition, distinct from Fabris’ reading, “cartography” did not refer to physical maps, but to virtual maps in which the concept of travel was a potential part of the story [see doc. no. 807646].