Title: A sojourn in Patmos. Author: Jorge Macchi. Place and date: Buenos Aires, 2005. In occasion of the exhibition Travelling. Alberto Sendrós Gallery, Buenos Aires.
Write down those things you see, and those which are, and those which are to be after them. Saint John’s apocalypse
I can imagine Saint John sitting on his rock in the island of Patmos, another rock lost far into the sea, torn between contemplation and duty. I see him writing at top speed what his senses dictate him: monsters with numerous heads coming out of the sea, seas turned into blood, earthquakes, volcanoes erupting, angels playing trumpets, thunder voices, devastating plagues, and over all, many people, a lot of people praying, dying, suffering, blaspheming and moaning or cheering up for the unleashed fury. I can imagine him linking events and images with an overwhelming logic, like the script writer of a film where he himself is playing the leading role in that very moment, having for himself the role of the only one and astonished witness of destruction.
A car is moving along a winding road skirting the mountains. It’s not clear where it is heading towards, but the eye of the camera chases it from high above. There aren’t any more witnesses, and it seems there are no more protagonists, just an automobile, an invisible helicopter and a winding road that leads to tragedy. It is the beginning of “The Shinning”, but it could be any of the images that start off in these white papers. Sometimes, when I look at Duville’s drawings, I feel tempted to move the action forward so as to see where they will lead to. Fortunately, they are not just still drawings on a piece of paper, and each of them starts off a film which is nonexistent and thus unpredictable.
Some time ago I was thinking of how it would be to make a film whose argument could not be remembered. I thought it would be a movie with numerous and simultaneous beginnings which would move towards the inevitable point of disappointment. It would result in an unbearable lack of fluidity, as if, at every moment, there existed the danger of immobility or silence. Nevertheless, there would be something surviving the permanent loss: some environment, some mood, some anxiety, and that would finally be the core of this impossible film. I recall this as I see the apparently expressionist strokes on Duville’s drawings. The urgency they have been done with is the urgency of the one who testifies that something irremediably escapes him and that considers himself the only witness. It is the anxiety of the one who awakes in the middle of the night and tries to write on paper the adventures of a dream, with both the intention and wish that language might hold what remains of the permanent dissolution of the images.
Duville is the Apocalyptic Saint’s most feared nightmare. A nightmare much more terrifying than the catastrophes that he patiently describes in his accounts: a John without memory, tortured by the remorse of not being able to tell things in the order they have been seen and heard. And over all, a John maddened by solitude, in his island of Patmos, the only witness of a destruction without people, trying to decipher the signs sent by those independent and useless machines, permanently pestered by the divine fury.