Novus Atlas Coelestis/Carlos Macià

Novus Atlas Coelestis is a one of a kind book by Carlos Macia, a Cuban born artist who grew up in Miami. Macia spent many years in seminaries in Spain and the Dominican Republic in the 1970s. By 1980, he decided he was not destined for the priesthood and then devoted his life to another passion: art. The influence of religion, though, was can be found in Macia's work throughout his short career.

Macia created this atlas in 1992. The book is an odd blending of the traditional with the modern, and venturing into it is a bit like venturing into an uncharted corner of a country we know at the back of our minds, where the language seems familiar, yet beyond our understanding. It's a place where history informs us, yet it's only a vague familiarity with what has come before.

The book is covered in an animal parchment wrap that has a border of machine-stitched black thread, and is titled using transfer lettering. Immediately we experience the dichotomy of the traditional/modern. We open the book to reveal a burlap cover, painted black, and the first page of the book: a solid black surface, bordered in ochre, blue and white. Delving deeper into the book, we enter what appears to be an old illuminated manuscript: each page is painted by hand, and there is occasional use of gold leaf. The drawings are richly detailed. But then there is the artist's liberal use of transfer lettering throughout the book, and the occasional appearance of a pages made of mylar, to bring us back to the modern.

And if we look closely at the hand-written "text" of the book, which, on the surface, appears to be nothing more than scribbling, we realize that there is something unusual going on here, too: if it is scribbling, it is very controlled scribbling. There is a definite baseline evident in the handwriting, and there are no descenders (none of the parts of letters that dip below the baseline, as in lower case Ps and Qs.)