The word atlas conjures up two very different ways of perceiving the world. The first one that springs to mind is of a book containing a planet-spanning collection of maps, exhaustively descriptive. And then there's Atlas the Greek titan, condemned to carry the weight of the entire world (1) on his shoulders. The latter meaning begat the former: when cartographers started publishing map collections in book-form, they often included in the frontispiece of those collections an image of the world-bearer.

Spanish artist Fernando Vicente's artography (2) revisits this fusion of the descriptive and the symbolic, but expands the concept to its literal conclusion. Superimposing human and animal forms onto the countries and continents of a map, Vicente transforms familiar geographic contours into surprising new constructs. Maps become living creatures - although some ostensibly formerly living ones - and many of which have an ominous, unnerving quality. Maybe that's because of Vicente's predilection for slicing open his subjects, their exposed anatomy/geography investing them with the same morbid quality evident in Bodyworlds, the famous travelling exhibition of plastinated and dissected human bodies.

Not that Vicente's inspiration needs that movable mortuary. Zoomorphism's (3) pedigree in cartography is centuries old. Earlier posts on this blog have covered maps showing Asia as a horse (4), Europe as a queen (5), and the world as a cloverleaf (6). These bizarre old maps are often catalogues of obscure symbolic references, now half forgotten or hard to fathom. Modern examples are usually easier to grasp. They can be the result of the blatant suggestiveness of geography itself, as with the Southern Ontario Elephant (7). Other times, zoomorphic cartography is actively landscaped into being, as in the city laid out to resemble Evita Peron's head (8), or in Southern Sudan's proposed zoomorphic provincial capitals in (9).

Vicente's work is more related to the Southern Ontario Elephant than to the Southern Sudan Rhinoceros: the forms are not imposed on a landscape, but merely teased out of it, and onto the map. One could argue that maps are not made for such teasing. Essentially utilitarian, they are manuals more than poems. But nothing transforms the randomly mundane into enjoyable art like a map, as any cartophile will appreciate. Vicente transforms this passive appreciation into an activity, probing maps for hints of non-geographic forms: is this isthmus an elbow? Can that mountain ridge be a brow?

This process must involve a lot of turning of maps, and squinting at them. The familiar shapes of countries are such strong mental images that the artist needs to get past them first. Take, for instance, his dolphin-shaped map of Mexico. Your average representation of Mexico, on a map with north up, suggests nothing so much as Mexico itself. But give it a quarter-turn and have east facing up: if you're looking for life-forms, that Yucatan peninsula now looks pretty much like some kind of tail. And then other parts of the country begin to look like other parts of the animal that eventually took shape: the snout pointing towards San Diego, the dorsal fin where the Gulf meets the Texas-Mexico border.