Title: Snow-Blind. A South American artist envisions a land up north Author: Brett Littman Place and date: New York, 2010. Published in Modern Painters magazine. New York, Summer 2010
In early 2008 the artist Matías Duville had a dream about Alaska — a place he’d never been and one that could hardly be further from his hometown, Buenos Aires, in terms of landscape, ecology, temperature, and culture. For a year he drew hundreds of images of the 49th state in his studio. During this time he never looked at pictures of it in books or on the Internet, so as to not color his meditations on the alien territory.
Duville, who is 36, likes to work on the edge of “blindness,” where, he says, “I can explore what is beyond the visible and my direct base of knowledge.” Throughout his career he has used imaginary geographies and juxtapositions of irreconcilable elements — a swimming pool in the ocean, an electric-organ keyboard at the top of a waterfall — as levers to pry open reality. His understanding of place and time is internal, personal, and variable — closer to a hypnotic state than to full-blown consciousness.
Born in Quilmes, a coastal town between Buenos Aires and La Plata, Duville left in 1995 to study advertising and art at the Martín Malharro Superior School of Visual Arts, in Mar del Plata. After graduating, in 1998, he was awarded several national scholarships to continue his studies and from 2001 to 2002 worked closely with the Argentine Conceptualist Jorge Macchi. The past few years have been busy for the soft-spoken artist. Since 2007 he has had solo shows at Galería Alberto Sendros, in Buenos Aires, and at Distrito 4 Gallery, in Madrid, and been included in group exhibitions at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, in Buenos Aires, and at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, in Santiago, Chile. In June, Galería Alberto Sendros will host another solo show of his work.
All this exposure has helped Duville establish a reputation among curators, critics, and collectors in South America, the United States, and Europe as one of the rising stars of the Argentine art scene. His diverse output ranges from quick crayon sketches to large faux-naïf landscape paintings on plywood, and from images burned into pile rugs to ink drawings on silk and site-specific murals. “I work with different materials and substrates,” he says, “to merge the narrative and action with the surface to force experimentation with the image and a distortion of the original story.”
In his Alaska drawings, says Duville, “I was trying to find the end of landscape as a genre of imagemaking by working with places not on the map that are ruled and governed by their own natural laws.” Such a project has strong literary precedents, in which authors test the limits of what they know and what readers will accept. The most directly related book might be Raymond Roussel’s 1910 novel “Impressions d’Afrique.” Although the title recalls 19th-century travel writing, Roussel rarely left his Paris hotel, let alone France, so his “impressions” are not based on his own exploits, nor indeed on reality. They are instead lifted from his imagination, resulting in an inventive, often absurd, and highly surreal portrait of the continent.
Under the title “Future Memories: Mental Trip,” Duville assembled crayon drawings depicting cars trapped in a glacier; a train passing through a mountain; a house of ice, with one yellow window, precariously perched atop a mountain; a frozen waterfall hanging over a cliff; a campfire emitting an antelope-shaped cloud of smoke; and a fish, seamlessly incorporated into the landscape, sucking a river into its sharp-toothed mouth. Mostly black and white, with sparse bursts of color, they recall Seurat’s wonderful Conté-crayon pictures from the late 1800s, in which the outlines of objects and figures snap in and out of focus, as if seen through a fog or mist. Like those, Duville’s images convey contradictory emotions: a deep sense of wonder at the sights in this foreign place, as well as a palpable foreboding about the unresolved and unknown.
In 2009 the artist decided to take his project in a new direction. He wanted to see “what would happen to the drawings if my mind met the reality” of the actual Alaskan landscape, in all its grandeur and banality. So that summer he rented an RV and drove around the state for several weeks.He allowed himself to make his drawings only from inside the vehicle, on the fold-out dining table, thus limiting his influences to things he could see through the window.
This collision with reality immediately deconstructed the world he had spent a year envisioning and created fresh tensions and contradictions, as new objects and events were layered into the imagined environment. The resulting drawings are less fantastic and extemporaneous than the first set but no less interesting, their visual lexicon expanding to include native animals and trees, weather conditions, and ships, along with A-frame houses, geodesic domes, igloos, and roadside buildings whose façades are emblazoned with large images of thunderbirds, eagles, and fish — all things Duville saw.
The project’s third phase is currently occurring back in Buenos Aires. Duville continues to draw Alaska, which for him is now part dreamscape and part reality, in compositions that continue to be rich and multilayered. It is unclear whether he will ever reach an end. We will just have to wait and see if this explorer finds his way out of the maze he has created for himself.