A Version of Destruction: the Mutant. Santiago García Navarro
0. This essay proposes an iconographic interpretation of the work of Matías Duville, based on four ideas-images which, in our view, vertebrate it almost entirely: weathering, shelter, mutation and the imaginary. An anthropological lineage that diffuminates into history underpins the first three, while the fourth stems from sociology, proving to be particularly valid to this date. However, it is the whole that renders each one of them straightforwardly akin to our contemporary sensibilities.
One of this essay’s hypotheses is that, in the work of Duville, different dimensions of the subjective, though seemingly absent, are translated into several depictions of space, the body and the object. Throughout fifteen years of work, Duville has focused on unfolding landscapes, objects within the landscape (or the void), architectural and engineering works, forms in displacement, situations of beholding, or observation, each of which could be interpreted as the spatialization of a specific viewpoint on the unstable territories that configure the affects and emotions of our present.
A second hypothesis is that these figurations revolve around a series of recurrent patterns, from which Duville draws certain forms of composition (which the layout of this show intends to underscore, taking them as a guiding thread). To wit: holes and cavities; round objects closed upon themselves; bearers, channels and vehicles of certain forces (of water, of air, of combustion, etc.), bodies undergoing symbiotic processes; bodies, objects and places shattered or broken by impacts (or tensed by the imminence thereof); bodies and architectures in balance and unbalance; relations between spaces underwater and above the surface; things that unfold by dissolving or volatilizing; floating things and the surrounding of suspension that they generate; swirling environments and whirlwinds; grounds as bottoms, riverbeds, or seabeds; vast territories traversed by solitary life forms; patterns that retain and simultaneously give way.
In almost all the works, the process of mutation which the elements arisen from these patterns are undergoing is evident. But, also, these processes frequently appear before us at an instant of particular ambiguity, to the point that we are unaware of the direction they are moving toward, or the meaning that they might come to acquire. In the work of Duville, ambiguity is above all a physical ambiguity, that of matters and energies. As a result of their motion, a morphology is created of surfaces, protrusions and other spatial, objectual and corporeal formations, most of which has a liquid consistency. Sometimes of a light liquid, some of a dense or thick one (hence the occasional use of mud for drawing). And a liquid which, be it figurative or metaphorical, sallient or marginal, affects the image as a whole. The third hypothesis, therefore, is that mutation is the main structural element of these patterns; that on account of which everything in Duville’s work appears to be in motion, be it within a figure or in the passage of this figure from one place to another.
The fourth and final hypothesis suggests that, when Duville generates these mutant space-bodies, he is simultaneously generating an imaginary. An imaginary is social by definition (even individual imagination is, only its activity consists of singularizing what is given to itsocially), and structures codes and institutions. Duville enters into those imaginaries –he is interested in those associated to forests and seas, winter and fire, to collisions, cabins and mountains–, he reverts them to (their) simpler elements, and while he is exploring the already stripped territories, he begins to detect the presence of bodies, of beings, of things prone to exist in environments less determined by our cultural codes and more open to mutations. It is the perfect moment to, on the basis of dismantled social imaginaries, suggest the ida of a common structure, a basis for more vast imaginaries. It is also because of this that the images Duville creates are structurally ambiguous, have a liquid consistency and, finally, tend to a shifting reality that we should probably no longer consider fantastic.
1. One of the earliest significant works by Duville, from the time when he still lived in Mar del Plata, consists of a series of drawings over silk, depicting, among other things, bridges, dangling spiders, turbulent swimming pools and sprawling hamlets in the midst of a storm.
Numerous works between 2002 and 2006 consolidate the search started by Duville shortly earlier: that of the iconographic alteration of image by alteration of its medium. Once the drawing is concluded, Duville shifted certain threads of the silk in such manner that what had appeared as static in the image gained dynamism once distorted, or what had been drawn with dynamism was accelerated or became downright dizzying. Another effect consisted in that, upon looking at the work, the spectator could perceive, in a not altogether clear manner, two overlapping situations or temporalities.
Between 2006 and 2011, Duville applied another procedure over several landscape paintings, following the same logic: when he finishes to convey form to an image, which he does in acrylic over chipboard, he scratches small pieces off the surface –with the respective painted fragment, of course– and in some cases he relocates them along othersectors of the same surface. The result evokes the effects of a hurricane, of rain, of fog, of light, of stars.
Therefore, in both procedures, what is represented and the material conditions of the representation fulfill the function of producing an image, rather than bringing it to a crisis. Instead of making evident the non-representational mechanisms that make possible the representation, pointing out the latter’s artificial nature, they tend to minimize the difference between representation and its mechanisms, generating resonances of a different nature. For instance, they allow to think that what occurs in one plane of existance occurs on another, and what changes in one dimension causes effects beyond it.
When Duville draws following standard procedures –charcoal, pastel or crayon over paper, to name the most frequent ones–, the search for a resonance on another plane, or of a passage toward him, does not disappear. In those cases, his figurations rather convey the impression of having been drawn as if the author had captured them on the moment of their conception, of their metamorphosis or their dissintegration, bringing to bear the uncertain limits between them.
By applying the same “organic” line to figures as foreign to one another as a fox, a topography or the walls of a cabin, Duville underscores the common matter of which they are all made. Which, in turn, hints at the versatility for a passage from one to the other.
In the case of some pools drawn on silk, all that is shown is water –the enclosure and outline of the cubicle–, removing the cavity, which remains empty (which, from the viewpoint we are advancing, is merely anecdotal; from another one, it could prove an interesting paradox).
2. Over this kind of shroud out of which all is made –as if it were a slightly more solid ether–, Duville tests a repertoire of objects that evoke feelings of shelter: cabins, caves, cars, motor homes, canoes, zeppelins. These objects, exposed to the forces of nature –in a less climatic than ontological sense–, mutate. But mutation, in Duville’s work, does not seem to mean simply that an object shifts from one nature to another, but that it develops several at a time (all of which, of course, are mutant). It is the case of the tiny wooden log whose grains flow like water, as if within the crust matter were more liquid. Only that trunk can be, simultaneously, some kind of water vessel (the alleged log is pale blue): for instance, a riverbed seen from a cross section perspective. In any case, the flow is contained, even though we have no hint as to the direction in which the energy it is dragging is headed (it would not be absurd to think that it cycles internally in a loop).
If the groin of a living bear can serve as a habitat, why not that self-contained river? Or the zeppelin which, even coming to threads, lifts off?
There is an effort –sometimes titanic– in each of those acts of (self)protection, even in those that are unsuccesful. And although the solutions may be considerably varied iconographically, something pertaining to shelter repeats itself: the dog-basket shaped enclosure –which could also be a cradle– where the fox cuddles while artic winds are howling all around; the trunk or chest that is jettisoned from –or about to perch on– a surface for which seems to be a perfect fit; the array of cabins that seem to have been sectioned for some proportionately gigantic sharp element (what we perceive is something that was left violently unprotected); the hamlets whose chimneys breathe out floating animals (or animal-shaped fumes: description –we insist– is an exercise of ontological implications).
A scattered amount of works offers a dual formulation for this feeling of shelter: comprising an exterior featuring a dominant element of the image, and an interior that appears as mere framework of the exterior, while also as the position from which that exterior is observed. Among other images: the interior with dampened or tarnished glass, where a somewhat oniric mountain range appears in the horizon (by showing us the glass and the landscape, but not the position of the point of view, Duville conveys to us with greater clarity the interior’s feeling of shelter, which is where we are imaginarily located);
the interior of the tree trunk from where someone (we, the spectators, to begin with) observes the flight of a swan (and can hardly see –but do feel– the inside of the trunk); or some type of vehicle from which the horizon is glympsed, framed by the windows (and we do not see the vehicle).
In other drawings, objects collide against fluids, and we see them from a high angle an instant after they pierce through the surface. This allows to follow the course of the object sinking and emphasize the contrast between the closed nature of that object and theformless mass that received it: a sinking car.
Combining this high angle with the inner-outer unfolding, another drawing shows a runway joining two ends of a cavern’s pit. From the cavern one can see the clear sky, but, down below, the feeling is not of confinement, but of shelter. The sky’s clarity is rather a reflection –and not an opposite– of the cavern. At most this painting conveys the swelling of a nearly imperceptible melancholy.
But there are things that are already closed upon themselves, giving the feeling of something rounded, self-sufficient: the open fruit of cotton, the meteorite, or the galleon covered by a kind of semi-transparent baloon, which hints at the shape of a pumpkin; even the fine circle drawn by the swan when swimming over a silent surface (a circle that may be more than a circle, a magical sign, a magnetic field); the bed with tiny scattered rocks –in turn reminiscent of mountains–, which is also a circle; or the micro city of a skyscraper cluttered in a small lunar valley, which summons feelings of shelter, firstly on account of being miniaturized; but, also, because it is as if it were embraced by the almost perfectly round shape of the valley. The tiny and the round, as it has been suggested, formalize the feeling of protection.
3. Entwined with these spaces –we should almost say: interweaving them–, the outdoors. The outdoors are sometimes not even portrayed, but barely suggested by a “pictorial off-camera” field, as in the mentioned landscapes seen from holes or windows, or by means of objects so closed upon themselves that they refer to something to which they have closed (an igloo), or a ship that turned its aura –or its atmosphere– into a ghost capsule, or a meteorite, or the fruit of a cotton plant).
And then there are the outdoors that are recognized by their effects, such as those that slipped through the particles of a house’s structure and generated such centriphugal violence that caused it to give in, crumbling down the walls.
But the elements do not always entail damage or annihilation. They can merely refer to something distemperate, or extremely quiet, or very silent. All of which, of course, has existential resonances. It is what we feel when seeing a rope falling into the void with countless pennants tied to it, the coldness of a seemingly prehistoric fish suspended in mid-water (we assume it is water), the quivering duplication of the moon over a black sky by the sort of moon through which we are shown the blurry sight of a petrified forest, or of the lush mountains from the glass superimposed to it, simultaneously staining it (here too there is an exterior seen from an interior, but we do not have the slightest information of which place it is). The mental states arising from these images are disparate forms of an irrecuperable emotional distance from what occurs, from what is observed, which is not only nostalgia, hopelessness, or despair, though these do transpire from this systematic exploration of the outdoors that seems to be the purpose of Duville’s work.
4. We experience the human world as an endless series of complex and unpredictable flow systems, which are partially accounted for by recent philosophical concepts such as post-Fordism, cognitive capitalism, and post-modernism. All of them, with different nuances, refer to the extreme flexibility and energetic demand which, be it in the forms of economy, labor or culture, underlies our current existence. Such flexibilities run through institutional structures, market transactions, emotional relationships, and our own, accelerated and complex imagination. In this context, we find ourselves inhabited by felings of unstability and variance, every day having to face situations of vulnerability, and flight or resolution of this vulnerability, of protection and loss or the surrender of that protection. In the face of similar circumstances, we do not have any orientation parameter other than our own bodies or the communities that we precariously manage to establish. All else is the outdoors.
A state and territory of unstability, the outdoors are a powerful generator of imaginaries, especially for suspense, terror and catastrophe. To nurture them, film frequently draws on figures from a millenary tradition such as the forest and the sea: Jaws and its sequels, The Poseidon Adventure, the Friday the 13th saga (all of which are films from Duville’s childhood), Titanic, The Blair Witch Project, Sleepy Hollow (all of which immediately precede Duville’s earliest works), The Village, the remake of The Poseidon Adventure and The Cabin in the Woods (which were shot since Duville has been working as an artist), among thousands of other titles. If these scenarios are more frightening on screen today than in situ, it is no less true that their ancestral disturbing power continues to hold an imaginary sway.
But, in other days, this imaginary was even more disturbing. In Europe, maritime shores began to no longer be perceived as a threat since the XVII Century, when the Dutch painted the first coastal landscapes as a source of aesthetic delight, and, therefore, worthy of contemplation. Until the coasts stabilized completely in most of the world with the popularization of beach resorts between mid 19th and 20th Centuries. But every now and then they destabilize, as occurred with the Asian tsunami ten years ago (not a few of whose victims were, precisely, bathers). Something similar should be said about deep waters, from which we appeared to be safe by way of technological advances, until two new resonant shipwrecks occured: the cruise ship in Italy and the ferry in Korea. For a moment, we staggered.
The forest, in turn, is the terrestrial ocean lying in between Medieval towns and cities, whose clearings hide Robin Hood –terror of those protected behind walls–, where the wolfseduces Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel are marooned, where Chinese literature sets its ghosts loose to wander, and Celtic legends their gods. (The forest being so different and distant, on the other hand, to tropical jungles, to a much slower and viscous horror: José Eustasio Rivera’s The Vortex, Apocalypse Now).
In Mar del Plata, Argentina’s prominent beach resort, there is forest and ocean, and both landscapes lay their imprint on Duville’s youth. The Bosque Peralta Ramos, near one of whose borders the Duvilles established their homestead during the 1980’s, saw the flourishing of the Alpine style and cabin sentimentality. It is a place where any horror film, especially a Hollywood one, could have been shot. As to the sea, it could be said to be pre-Patagonian, by geographic proximity, due to the cold currents that flow across it all year, and because of its shores’ infinite sadness during winter.
Duville always worked with the materials of his surroundings. In Mar del Plata, he had the sea a couple kilometers away, and the forest at a few hundred meters. But, in addition to that, for instance, his interest for swimming pools comes from his father’s occupation, and the material on which he made some of his first drawings were the photo albums that labs gifted him when he brought his home-made prints for developing. The trip to Alaska that he planned and carried out in 2008 as a part of an art project should not be understood as an exeption, but as another twist on this domestic dimension of his work: from this perspective, Alaska would be the vast expanse of Marplatense landscapes taken to an extreme.
5. Duville’s work incorporated the experience and the imaginary of seas and forests (and their cabins), making them ubiquitous. Many times as backgrounds against which uncertain figures float and rest. Others, as the environment in which a no less uncertain action unfolds. The brindge that spans across the frame in a steep diagonal line leads to a forest where the tension in the scene converges, whose characters are not human, but, rather, the aura of the bridge and the trees themselves.
Then there is the hull of a ship about to crash against the summit of an underwater mountain, which matters less as the focus of imminent disaster than as a medium to emphasize the monumental dimension of an ectopic landscape, one that is destabilizing for that very reason. What becomes visible to us in this play on scales is the magnitude of what is unknown to us.
Another painting turns ambivalence into a paradox. At the center, a shelf where nearly twenty pines are cluttered together, as an outpost of a forest that whispers from the other side of the stockade and does not allow itself to be seen. The forest, which is the outdoors, makes itself present in the twenty little pines, which are “inside”, and this interior, in turn,“domesticates” the trees. However, both situations are suspended, unresolved, because what dominates the frame is the situational –and also existential– uncertainty of something occupying the foreground without knowledge of why.
6. Unstability in Duville’s work –as we suggested in another paragraph– starts with the use of a distorted or damaged medium. But, in time, it is transferred to the pure drawing by means of details decisive enough as to reorganize the meaning of what we see. It is the case of floating stains above a mountain, whose texture and position in the painting may turn into water what at first sight we had thought was sky.
But, naturally, unstability also penetrates the figures: homes or mountain-vehicles are commonplace, as are hamlets that double as mountain ranges, and swans that are also smoke, and waves that are also mountain ridges, and the speed of a car is simultaneously the trunk along which the car races at full speed, and the plain area of a mountain pass that is also the surface of a water course over which a swan walks and simultaneously swims, and the floor of what remains from a detached chalet (the chalet itself became outdoors) which is in turn the medium (perhaps the humus, perhaps tar, perhaps Chinese ink) through which a fish moves.
All of this is possible because, in the topographies Duville imagined, even the rigid is open to transformation, flowing, and may even come undone, like the solid wave pierced by a projectile, or the mountain-wave that is about to plummet over a helicopter (in this case, it would be interesting to measure the quality of that other time). There would thus seem to be a correlation between mutation and the outdoors. But not so much owing to the premise that adversity compels adaptation, as to the fact that Duville’s outdoor territories are themselves plastic, lax, unpredictable, and not necessarily adverse.
7. As it is known, modernity is the civilizatory stage where all religious, political, philosophical, but also experiential, existential certainty, must be reconceived in the light of the crisis of solutions that were imposed by transcendent spheres (the King’s divine charter, the Pope’s power over the Emperor, the priesthood’s power, both constituent and overseer of the subject’s intimacy, etc.) Or, however, the historical moment in which the transcendence-immanence dilemma fluctuates faster, becoming increasingly evident.
But for that same reason, it is the time when all transcendental recurrences show even more clearly the catastrophic effect of their flawed constitutions. It was the case of Arno Breker’s eugenic neoclassicism, the devastation caused by the Hitlerian war machine and the condemnation of Nazi idealism at the end of the Second World War; or the case of Aleksandr Deyneka’s socialist imaginary represented by idealized scientists, athletes and workers, Stalin’s massacres and the collapse of the foundations of that imaginary with the fall of the Berlin Wall. As far as art is concerned, those are radical moments of ideologic denial of unstability enforced by aesthetic control.
Almost on the antipodes of this, today’s Manga provides mobile identities to consumers from all over the planet, to whom the world consists in a sum of sceneries of devastation (the shuddering sadness of its characters emanates precisely that apocalyptic imaginary). Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe probed the desolations of the Manga universe by “releasing” a character called Ann Lee from its commercial fate: they bought her at market price and bestowed her with multiple possible lives thanks to the work of a group of artists whom they invited to collaborate in their project (although it is true that it would have been more decisive to release her from her apocalyptic sadness: such is the stillness of apparently mobile identities).
Ann Lee’s liberation, which implies the leap from a fictional subjectivity to another one tied to the fluctuations of the real market, is not disconnected from the fate of those virtual pop stars known as vocaloids, endowed with the ability to perform live on real stages, and whose presence is increasingly less distinguishable from human presence. It is as if the magmatic environment where the vocaloids’ weightless and hyperflexible bodies float were ever closer to what we understand to be our reality, or at least what would best represent it. This viscous virtuality is one of the contemporary forms of the unstable, because it involvesthe blurring of dimensional limits (real/virtual, for instance, or real/fictional), unstability and mutability. Our era is the era of Manga, of vocaloids, and of Duville’s mountain-bed creatures.
8. According to Todorov’s definition of the fantastic genre, one of the main features is the hesitation in the narrator, in one of the characters –and, in any case, always, in the reader– before a state of events that seems to stand undecided between the natural- and the supernatural order. In the construction of the plot, of situations and of characters, motivations and ends find no decisive explanation in neither of those two orders, but are rather intertwined, remain in suspense, or are truncated. From this point of view, Duville’s visual fictions seem to fit the genre to perfection.
However, I believe that, in Duville, hesitation has an entirely different function and meaning. It is not uncertainty before two oppositing and reciprocally threatening orders, but the passage between multiple dimensions, orders, states, and natures. Such alternative viewpoint would obviously entail another ontology of fiction, which would allow us to consider the work as a fictional expression of a reality that, while hypothetical, is not impervious to documentation (either in the present or in a non distant future).
The arts, sciences and spiritual practices of scores of people who in an ever increasing manner become directly involved, either individually or collectively, with other beingsfrom other realms, inquire, attest and conmemorate an integrated world of the living and the non-living –although, to some, everything is living–, whose fundamental premise would be the enhancement of the powers of life.
The proliferation –not by chance also within the artworld– of non institutionalized practices that bring forth ancestral knowledge about the human universe and the cosmos, is leading to the incorporation of non rationalist views in contemporary ways of life, which, among other things –and this is where we wanted to get– make no distinction between the limits of the bodies that we see such as we see them, nor the effects of those bodies’ actions or their minds as we consider them, because all that we see and consider has effects, reverberations and multiplications in many other planes (astral and other). From this perspective, what can be said about Duville’s fictions but that they are realist visions in an expanded field of knowledge and in the contemporary experience of the world?
Xul Solar, artist, inventor of languages, expert in religions, and one of Borges’ closest friends, believed all his life to be a realist artist of a reality that at the time could only be seen by him, but which in the future would be normal to men. Duville never undertook any of Xul’s missions, but sets his work in a future that could be that of Xul’s. Therefore, Duville would be no less of a realist.
In La novela luminosa [The Bright Novel], Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero sought to contrast the tediumm of daily life to those moments of brief illumination that could alter the ordinary course of things, connecting them with unknown beings. In the mutations the narrator tells us about, it is not the transformation of a body’s physical form that is relevant, but the subject’s ability to displace mentally, to absorb alien forces and enhance and share the power they contain, which requires subjectivities that are aware of their own multiplicity:
“I refrained from commenting, for years and years, that I have grounds to assume that, in some way overlapping with our known world, there exists a –dimension?– populated by beings of considerable size, invisible and intangible, who seem to have no interest in us. I refrained from commenting, for years and years, that a plant once produced a very strange seed by influx of my love for a woman; that I telepathically communicated with a dog, and that, years later, the night that same dog was poisoned, I dreamt about it, many miles away […]. I refrained from commenting, for years and years, that it was once given to me to see the colors of a landscape –in a dream– through the mind of a friend who is a painter; and that I once listened to a song through the mind of another person. And I refrained from commenting many other things that I continue to refrain from commenting”.
To Hugh Everett, author of the theory which is the basis for the Multiple Worlds Interpretation, the problem is that he did not refrain from publicly commenting his hypotheses, which during many years brought hum the scorn of his colleagues. But, today, the Multiple Worlds Interpretation is widely accepted. It basically holds that, since it is impossible to measure a physical system without altering it through observation, the system will always be subject to aleatory evolutions. Not only that: each act of observation/measurement would, also, introduce a forking that would lead to several development instances, which would not only be equally possible, but also coexisting.
As many contemporary scientists assure, many of whom conduct parallel investigations on scientific problems ans spiritual practices, the passage between these instances would be possible to consciousness: it would be linked to the possibility of gaining mental access to less dense states of matter, in which it would practically become confused with energy, which would allow to assume a much closer relationship between intellectual production and modification of matter. It would constitute a willed mutation. Many currents amongst those labeled esoteric have been making the same assertion for centuries.
9. Fiction, says Wolfgang Iser, duplicates or repeats the world, and, by repeating it, formulates the imaginary in a certain direction, the imaginary being the region of realitythat is integrated to fiction, the real as material for fiction. This capacity of duplicating the world and formalizing the imaginary is at the basis of both commercial fiction and the academic forms of art, as well as of any art or unspecfic practice that involves risk, experimentation, and questioning. What is more: it lies at the basis of any non artistic form of fiction (such as, for instance, urban myths).
But what is meaningful about our days is that the distance between the fictional, the real and the imaginary that connects them is no longer so ostensible. Thus, if by changing the relationship between two parts the third will inevitably be altered, the fact that one of the parts becomes more permeable to the others will make the others more permeable to each other. One of the effects of this indistinction is that what is shaped in fiction may affect the real as such. This is what happens with the vocaloids. And if, furthermore, the observation of the real and the points of view that are created on its basis begin to be understood –as the Multiple Worlds Interpretation would have it– as real modifications of a multidimensional world, the influence of what we imagine on what occurs is greater and more direct.
The imaginary being itself unspecific, formless and volatile entails, in a fluid time such as ours, a greater ease to remain undetermined or return to a point of indetermination, as well as a higher speed to transform, enter into a transition or proliferate. But for the same reason, it can also be, just as well, more easily controlled. Production of the visible by the media is the main force exerting this control: due to the discretionary, ubiquitous and persistent nature of its impact, it has the power of formalizing and immediately channeling the fuzzy and almost instantly fix its meanings, to the point of designing imagination, at once producer and receiver of imaginaries. This instantaneous and permanent design, of course, distresses the human mind.
Duville works with this imaginary in a semi-fuzzy state: almost at the time, it could be said, when forms begin to stand out from their magmatic backgound. Even so, that background is full of more consistent remains, fragmentary and unintelligible as they may be. It is thus possible to find, in the mids of indifferentiation, a piece of Hollywood junk, of weekend magazine kitsch and organized leisure aesthetics. Duville generally filters these excesses and reuses them to mount mutant spectacles of nature and culture: solid tsunamis, highways embedded into safety walls (or gutters into walls) orderly migrations of fauna and flora (trunks, mammals and birds over hasty rivers), and cabins in the midst of a process of volatilization.
Now: if we talk of catastrophe in Duville’s work, nothing stops us from assuming, then, that the catastrophe is happening now instead of in an apocalyptic future. Moreover, there would be no need to consider it as being necessarily negative, but, rather, as a situation more frequently driven to its own limits, and which would therefore render all acts and their effects more extreme. In the universe or the universes proposed by Duville, the liquid is in the solid and all is transubstantiation.
10. Duville does not always conceive his work in series, although it is the organization form he most frequently employs. But since he has the habit of producing a large number of works, many pieces find themselves left out of the series, even if they had been performed, or even conceived, as parts or spin-offs of said series. Simultaneously, Duville’s production system is based on the constant recovery of elements developed in prior series –the patterns to which we had already made reference–, which reinforces the non-linearity of his work. It is because of all this that Duville’s work may be understood as a single work, and its idea as a vast, continuous and multiple flow.
11. Obviously, something pertaining to the destruction of the world, or of a world, is central in Duville’s work. The other three essays in this book address the matter from viewpoints that ultimately interlace, even though the authors have not read one another: in his interview to Duville, Jorge Machci evokes a certain apocalyptic situation, with equal parts of fiction and foreshadowing, as a way of delving into the distance between the imagined and the lived; Elfi Turpin associates disappearance to absurd or melancholic attempts to recover what is definitely lost, to trips without return, to natural disasters, to the end of man on the planet; matters which would all be, in turn, understood as manifestations of artistic endeavor; and Luiz Camillo Osorio, based on Günther Anders’ concept of “supraliminar”, refers to an end of the world triggered by man himself but which man fails to perceive due to its incommensurable scope, and he also dwells on an ethics of drawing which finds in the dissolution of time a form of resistance against that hyperrational destruction.