Getting lost in the labyrinth of Gerhard Marx’s words and maps

Mecurial Map 2025

Artists are often afraid of texts – of writers. They worry that in revealing the mechanics of what they do, through words, we might diffuse the inherent magic and ambiguity in their art. Some of South Africa’s most prominent artists strive to obfuscate their work, believing that by shrouding it in an enigmatic aura, it will always remain just out of reach, driving endless curiosity, questions, and discussions. They forget that text and writing are art forms too. It is not always harnessed to pin things down, but rather, like swirls of chocolate across a dessert plate, it drums up curiosity and adds another layer of pleasure, texture, and taste. Importantly, it can forge a deeper connection to the art.

This is primarily what much of my journalism and now my consulting work centres on: helping artists find the words and harness the language that can hold the ambiguity yet provide rays of clarity not only for viewers but for themselves. Artists need words to plot their way forward. You need to name where you have been in order to know what the next step is - or if, indeed, you have taken a step at all.

Extending the dessert metaphor… Words can function like the plate itself, the table on which the art is placed, framing the experience so that it is read in a particular way. Call it “controlling the narrative”, to borrow from Succession or PR parlance. In the title of his recent exhibition at Everard Read Joburg, Landscape is the Wrong Word, Gerhard Marx not only anticipates and deflects textual framing but, through other prominent quotes on the gallery walls, rather ironically (as he relies on text to do so) suggests that words are insufficient to the task of pinpointing the territory he is circling in this exhibition.

“A Question: Landscape would be the wrong word. So would nature. What is a visual language that speaks of that which is—the outside—but that simultaneously surrounds, envelopes, and includes me? How do you speak to that within which you swim without purporting to leave those waters?”

Marx’s visual language is rooted in taking maps – documents that purport to communicate fixed lines and impart certainty to the landscape (and the sea) – and turning them into labyrinthine visuals with no beginning or end. You would be literally lost at sea if you relied on one of his sculptural works, such as Mercurial Map, to navigate through choppy waters, for there is no land depicted in the geometric squares — simply a puzzle of map fragments denoting “water” territories.

Vast Interior, 2025.

In short, he drains maps of their supposed factual function, repurposing them into abstract forms that collapse borders, multiple spaces, eras, and timelines. This brings to mind the writings of Jorge Luis Borges, specifically The Aleph, which proposes a site of total simultaneity or omniscient perception – a microcosm that holds the entire universe. In Borges’s wry fashion, his attempt to describe the Aleph, which he encounters in someone’s basement staircase, becomes a long, dry, and ultimately futile account of “everything” the author has seen.

Marx introduces another text in the show that alludes to this quandary; the way naming things can lead to futility or deny depth: “If description renders everything as surface, then how to construct images that resist surface? ... How to describe space as opposed to object?”

In this way, Marx appears to be ruminating on the very problem that Borges wrestles with: how do you evoke something that, by its nature, cannot be represented? Or, put another way, how do you create a visual language which, by necessity, must parade specific visual qualities to be perceived when you aim to relay an idea that has no physical characteristics at all?

What is Marx aiming to represent? The answer is as capacious as an ‘Aleph’ – namely, the concept of space, place, and earth – the way physical frames, documents, lines, and dots on a page have come to delineate identity, power, nationhood, superiority, and control over nature and people, while providing psychological security. In splicing different parts of maps together, he creates a new territory that demonstrates the arbitrariness of these marks and documents, but also the importance we assign to “places” and nations. He drains them of specificity so that they come to stand in for an “Aleph”—a totality of spaces and places, but also limitless psychic space.

Of course, the result is a beautifully crafted object — all “surface”. In Marx’s hands, his works are even more slickly crafted, appearing as beautiful, desirable puzzles that demand study. Visual seduction is such an important part of the art game. Artists must compel the viewer’s gaze to draw them into the mystery the surface conceals. If the art is too pretty, though, the viewer may never look beyond the surface – they become fixated by it. Marx literally suggests “depth” via multiple cascading frames, layers, collages, and paths — the labyrinthine quality.

The “maps” made with plant material (see left) faithfully depict the process of bending nature to humanity’s desire to create order from chaos. Here, he pulls back the curtain, showing us that the labyrinths, or Alephs, are not natural manifestations – like a black hole in the galaxy – but rather the product of human conceits. At what point is the artist involved in constructing this fantasy? Particularly if, through aestheticising and repeating this condition, the artist attempts to make the labyrinth the Aleph – real. In Marx’s case, the slickness of his production and the high visual appeal of his art hold our attention and enhance the objectness – the tangibility – of the intangible.

The final question, of course, is what role words should play in this process. Should they bring us closer to the truth of the game at hand or become part of it?