Selfie, or the longest distance between Duville and himself Jorge Macchi. (MAM)RIO. 2015.
In the year 1999, the Antorchas Foundation proposed that I run some clinics (I am still astonished by that name) in the city of Mar del Plata. It was the first time I was coordinating this kind of meeting, and the experience was very satisfactory (at least for me) and also exhausting. One of the participants was Matías Duville, who showed a series of paintings relating to an imaginary heraldry.
After that experience we stayed in quite fluid contact: I saw his first exhibition in Buenos Aires in a place called Lelé de Troya, curated by the indefatigable Ana Gallardo; I saw his first exhibition in the Alberto Sendros gallery in 2003; in 2004 he participated in some artists’ meetings at my studio. At these meetings, at which each artist would talk about their work, projects and doubts, it was very obvious that Duville had left behind the innocence of his first steps. He was already a different person and above all a different artist: what had been static had become dynamic, and the images which later characterized his work were starting to appear.
In 2005 I wrote a text for his exhibition Travelling in the Sendros Gallery. I wrote very few texts for exhibitions, but it is without a doubt one of my favorites. I imagined Duville as Saint John contemplating the Apocalypse on his isle of Patmos. On the island our interview begins.
Macchi: A short time ago I received from a friend some photographs of the Isle of Patmos in the Aegean Sea, where Saint John supposedly wrote the Apocalypse. I looked at the photographs with a mixture of eagerness and disappointment, because inevitably the images did not fit with my romantic and tragic view of the island. In that moment I understood why I had never searched for photos of Patmos on Google, and I thought about your project Alaska, where imagination and reality were also superimposed. Why was it necessary for you to go to the real country and subject yourself to a possible disappointment?
Duville: It’s true. When I arrived at Anchorage from Seattle, Alaska had a negative impression on me. The splendor of the drawings had gone to hell, between the concrete, the bad architecture and the window displays with Eskimo clothes made in Taiwan. After a few days, and once I was on the highway, in the motor home everything got better. I had never been there, so I had in mind a generic image, the cliché that we all have of those places in the world – Copacabana, Hawaii, Russia from a carriage of the trans-Siberian – which is stronger than the territory itself.
It was very difficult for the drawings which I had managed to do one year before to resemble reality. When one travels to the “reality” one sees everything, including the detail of the things, with the perspective which the mind has at that moment. So I started to think about a kind of new geography. Paradoxically, inside the motor home I felt more at ease. I felt that that cubicle better resembled what I had gone to look for than what was outside, and in a way, during those days Alaska was much further away from what I had fantasized about one year before in my studio in Buenos Aires. Only then did I decide to climb towards another phase and start to move around in this kind of intermediate space between the real and the fantastic, and the project took a new course and I started to think that I had gone to Alaska to see myself from another angle and see what was happening with my work from that new platform. In a sense, I went to lose myself, or to put myself back together.
Macchi: Your answer includes lots of ideas and suggests many questions, but I am particularly attracted by the idea that more than Alaska in itself, the purpose of the trip was to see the environment through the windscreen of a mobile home. I remember a drawing of yours: a windscreen covered with squashed insects. Here, the environment comes literally towards you, violently, but luckily there is a sheet of glass that protects you. Tell me about the cars, the protective mobile homes.
Duville: The weather and the cars go hand in hand, or to put it better, they can function as a pair. The car as the protective skin manages to pass through the adverse weather. I did a lot of drawings about that situation in which the weather actually seems to fuse with the vehicle, melting it, freezing it or producing a transforming effect on its sheets of metal and glass. It is for a time a kind of indecipherable transformation. The light from the lighthouses, the music from the speakers, is a cutting from the nighttime scenery, almost a video clip through the windscreen. For a long time, this action made me think about the control of geography, and going a bit further, about the car as a protective suit which starts to make decisions for itself.
Thinking about the Alaska project, I think in a way the vehicle would move once the stimuli of each individual place were exhausted. In that sense, the highway could function as the canal which connected the images. I think that the drawing itself has a lot to do with the vehicle. When I finish one, having to think about what could happen in the north, the south or the east or the west. And so, each work functions as a kind of advance through unexplored territories. A kind of widening of the mental map.
Macchi: I would like to go deeper into what happens between one work and the next. You are comfortably positioned within the cabin of your car, that music sounds (STOP). What happens when you arrive at the crossroads? That is, how do you move from one work to the next? Your production is enormous: what makes you produce so much? When do you consider an image to be exhausted? That is a lot of questions, but maybe with one answer you can resolve them all.
Duville: Your questions take me to the works which cover the sum of multiple micro-narratives. I think that this domino effect, that compulsive habit of finishing an image and starting another, or to put it another way, one work makes you think of another, and so on successively, has to do with a method of covering territories, almost like a raid of information on an imaginary geography. A block advance, a journey through a kind of cemetery of ideas where one is nothing more than a simple witness of what one sees in one’s own mind. That sum of found things, landscape transformed, strange climatic phenomena gives as a result great bodies of works. Each image brings the idea of a new one. I think that they are places of constant change. So the work starts to move and to generate its own fuel. In that way, the new images mutate into others and those into others, and so on.
Macchi: You talk about the mechanism which takes you from one work to another, but you don’t say anything about the themes which you develop in the drawings. Sometimes you appeared to be talking about how you go from one abstract painting to another. What is represented in your drawings, however, is fundamental for understanding the Duville cosmos. We could talk about the ruin, the transfiguration, the apocalypse, the accident…Where do we start?
Duville: When I start to work, for example with the large-scale charcoal drawings, the first thing I think about is the wasteland where something is going to happen. A kind of battlefield where an action, a transformation, various forms of weather at the same time, are about to arrive. So they start to arrive, sometimes in installments, sometimes all at once. But it is not just a case of natural chaos. One could say that it is a kind of cocktail of chemistry, geography and psychology.
The whim of the mind suggests, for example, to cut a mountain in two, freeze an ocean for more than a thousand years and then defrost it, make a city levitate and transfer it to another site, invent the catastrophe by imposing a new system of gravity, etc. But I think that this expressive chaos also lives alongside the simple idea of getting hold of a material, twisting it, melting it, scratching it. I suppose that is it the action of modifying a context to a greater or less extent.
To me, ruin as a subject goes beyond the remains of a lost civilization. To me, it has a material or tangible effect. Telling a story where the main argument is the transformation of the subject interests me more than explaining why such a thing happened.
Macchi: I am attracted by this idea of chemistry, geography and psychology, three sciences which require an investigator. One might say that your works differ from each other based on the different concentrations which they have of each one of the disciplines. Here two questions arise for me. The first is, why in many cases do these transformations or alterations of the natural order go hand in hand with the destruction of the work or man’s footprint? Is there pleasure or fear in the catastrophe? Or both at the same time? The other question is, some of your works appear to describe a world in which human beings no longer exist, but where their productions have remained. There are even animals, but no humans. I think there is one exception: the painting Andante, where a huge dark human figure appears which makes me think of Goya’s El Coloso, although in your case the character appears more melancholy. What is the reason for this absence?
Duville: I think that to destruct is, in some ways, to alter the order of something, whether or not you eliminate it. The first works came about in this way, when I would pull the threads of a silkscreen canvas…on which I had previously drawn a swimming pool, I would sand down a polythene over a tarmac, looking for lost architectures in the shattered space suggested by the material, or I would take hold of a rug thinking: I am going to draw a volcano”. But in order to do this, I first needed to have something to alter this surface. Then the idea of an incandescent knife suggested itself. Afterwards I noticed that the knife, and therefore the action produced by me myself, could act like the effect of the lava spilling out of the volcano. This is an example of how I started to feel present but invisible in the work. And perhaps this is one of the reasons why I have never been interested in the human figure.
In these and other later works, the idea of destruction was mixed with the idea of transformation of a natural order and also with the idea of the act of generating an image which arises from the very essence of the material. I think that the spirit of this sequence of initial exercises was unleashed on the charcoal drawings on large-size paper. That is where all material transformation becomes more drastic, more geographical and more extensive, but this time in narrative terms. Almost like going beyond the first domestic images, and in this case following strongly the idea of modifying large areas of wasteland. Leaping from the catastrophe caused by an off-axis washing machine, when a mountain river overflows, in order to later empty it of water and see how the riverbed appears.
I like to think that the images come from a parallel reality, invisible in the traditional sense. I think that it is like attempting to decipher that state which is an unfolding of another world. Often, for example, I see a material (a petrified trunk, a volcanic rock, an abandoned car, an old keyboard synthesizer) and I try to connect myself to its story, and from there a new narrative or influence may arise. But sometimes I simply see the shapes that surround us and try to take that to another place.
Macchi: I remember now the first Steven Spielberg film, Duel (The devil on wheels, 1971). Have you seen it? There a lots of films with the same subject: the revolt of electrical goods, cars or other machines…what attracts me about your works is that they are the images of what remains after the film has finished. All of the tension of the film is resolved, but remains in the stroke or the movement.
Duville: Yes, I saw that film a long time ago, and I feel it is very present. There is something about the memory of things which have been used or exploited which has always attracted me, and it is precisely that aura which remains, surrounding them once they have been abandoned in a wasteland or a scrapyard or a dump. They project movement, they reincarnate on another plane and generate stories with an out of the ordinary meaning.
Macchi: In the text which I wrote for your show Travelling, in the Alberto Sendros gallery, I said: “The urgency with which [the drawings] are done is the urgency which reveals something which inevitably escapes him, of which he himself is the sole witness. It is the anxiety that wakes him in the middle of the night, and he tries to put on paper the unexpected events of a dream, with the aspiration and the hope that language will fix what remains of the permanent dissolution of the images”. I was saying that in relation to the apparent expressionism which characterizes your drawings. Can we talk about urgency?
Duville: Thinking about that sole witness, it brings to mind the idea of a great landscape. If we could see it at its zenith (which is impossible) it would be a multidirectional journey. I think that here the urgency lies in thinking that this platform, this great journey, is going to change imminently, and we need to record it as soon as possible. There is no map which can describe this area, it is a subject which is changing constantly. Where you were is not going to exist, it already has another form, the deforming nature of the mind took charge of making it mutate. To me, there lies the speed and the urgency which you note in that text. The exuberance of producing those sequences of images which are so all-encompassing, of thinking “I will not pass through this place again”. I have to crystallize that moment, because it is unique and unrepeatable. I think that one will never be able to explain or translate what is really happening in one’s head. One tries all the time to do it, and however it always remains contained, without being captured, a kind of indecipherable substance disseminated by the mind. Perhaps that impossibility is that which also feeds that engine of that flow of images which apparently has no end.
Macchi: There is something of this body language which is present in your music. Some years ago I saw you playing at a party with your brother. Electric guitars, distorted sounds, very pronounced rhythm and absurd lyrics contributed to achieving an atmosphere not far from that which floats over some of your painting. I imagine that there is no intention for this to occur, but how do you see the relationship between your visual work and your music?
Duville: Music is almost the name of a galaxy, because it is boundless. Everyone has a different link to music. In my case, because my brother Pablo has played the keyboard since he was eight years old and we shared a bedroom until we were 22 or 23, music was always a fundamental part of my life. There was no other option. When I was seven, I would fall asleep to the sound of a Casiotone. The sound would start very loud and would fade out while I entered into sleep, that is, it acted like a soundtrack for me to enter into the visual. Something very strange would happen to me when I closed my eyes and the different sounds of the synthesizer would generate new spectrums of colors. I remember a purple-violet, gigantic oranges. It was the sound of the future. I don’t know how to explain it now, because time tinges everything with nostalgia and vintage-ism, but at that moment it was like finding oneself with a new material, something absolutely inexplicable. I think that was the first link between the visual and the musical.
Later I started to play the electric guitar. (I was always interested in how the different shapes of guitar produced different sounds). We had a lot of bands. The Pupilos, the current one, is an almost factory band which goes from electro-garage to harder sound experimentation.
Macchi: Having so many variables for the development of your work, I imagine the variety and quantity of your references. Would you like to talk about that?
Duville: That question is so wide that I don’t know how to address it, because I like the beach and the snow at the same time. It has to do with that cocktail which we have already talked about, like English rock and American folk, from Sam Shepard (in Hawk Moon) to Atahualpa Yupanqui and his idea about the instrument as an extension of the tree, which I find incredible. The answers goes, as you can see, from the pampas to Yukon. I think my house was a bit like that when I was a child. I feel that I am the heir to an era when the encyclopedia was in fashion, and the concept of universality formed part of everything. Something like not being able to imagine the snowy mountains without their opposite image, a beach with coconut palms. But, in summary, I could name many people who I like for different reasons. The documentaries of Jack Cousteau, the Paul Valéry of Le Cimetière Marin, Lucio Fontana and Brancusi, a band from San Francisco from the 90s called Brain Jonestown Massacre (which based its name on Brian Jones, the Rolling Stones’ guitarist and the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, where a thousand people died in a mass religious suicide). My family is another very strong influence.
Macchi: Could we add the short story ‘The Swimmer’ by John Cheever, whom I discovered thanks to you. In general, interviews start with the question which you have just responded to. But the appearance of these names and these situations at this moment create a perfect cocktail with what we have been talking about until now. I would like us a take a break now and to leave some sensation floating.
Duville: Yes, let’s float on our backs a while. We’ll let the swimmer start to move away from pool to pool.