Title: Dr. Duville, I presume? Author: María Gainza Place and date: Buenos Aires, 2010. Published in the book Matías Duville, Esto fue otro lugar.
If I were called in To construct a religion I should make use of water Philip Larkin
July 2009: Road from Mar del Plata to Miramar. To the right, the sea fans out until reaching the horizon. Thousands of tons of water fall onto the coast, and foam gathers like furry little puppies. The rest stops, breakwaters and rocks go by, abandoned ruins of a civilization of sun worshipers that has gone elsewhere for the winter. Suddenly, green blocks the view. A wall of harsh, thick sea greens. The next time the sea appears, the landscape will have changed. Now the water is fifty meters below my feet, the cliffs holding back its onslaught. A shelter on a peak. From there, a handful of surfers on bikes look out onto the horizon. Their neoprene wetsuits dry in the sun on the hood of an old van and their faded boards lie on the grass like offerings ready to be tossed into the water.
The first time I saw Matías Duville’s drawings, I thought of the surf, and now, beside the cliff, with the wind howling around me, his images return to my mind. A kilometer into the turquoise of the water, the waves begin to rise up. One after another they move forward until one of them towers into the sky and, from its steamy crest, the figure of a man emerges.
Duville is no stranger to the recurring mystery of the surf, the impulse to run into, rather than flee from, catastrophe. The artist seems fascinated by the forces of nature. If he could, he would probably try to ride Hokusai’s great wave. The method used in surfing consists of non-resistance, of giving yourself over to the water that wants to rip you apart and, in Duville’s drawings, there is a sensation comparable to the ecstasy of sliding inside a wave. A cosmic energy that becomes ectoplasm: blue streams that connect the images. Meanwhile, Duville looks at the world from someplace far off: the distance of someone looking at the coast from out at sea.
Out there are the surfers with the tips of their boards breaching the water. Half their bodies above and the other half lost below the surface of the water. They have been at it for a few hours. That’s the paranoia that underlies Duville’s work. That’s why he opens up the earth, cuts the surface of the water, sketches maps to see what’s there. What he calls his “excavations” are perhaps nourished by the hours he has spent in the sea: what do legs hanging off the surfboard look like? How do sharks see them? Do they think they are twin serpents?
The petrified forest
It is impossible to determine exactly what world Matías Duville’s drawings come from. I don’t think an electroencephalography or a dreamer reader could figure it out. Haunted by this question, one day in July of 2009 I set out to find where his images came from, knowing full well that this was a task doomed to failure. Between the few words that the artist said, his family and the city where he had spent his teenage years, would it be possible to reconstruct the atmosphere that imbues his work?
The first time I interviewed Duville, my dog got out. He ran out the front door at the very instant that a dog walker was going by with his pack. When, agitated and bruised, I came back, my pet in tow, Duville said, “That’s a good start.” That was all he said (he doesn’t say much). Then I realized that, during the entire scene, he had not moved an inch. For a moment, I thought that he had been a bit rude. Then, when I got to know him better, I understood that that wasn’t it; Matías was from the forest, where an animal is something to be taken seriously.
“If you go to the forest, take a stick for the dogs,” Duville warned me when I told him about my intention to visit Mar del Plata. That warning immediately turned every animal into a potential threat. Peralta Ramos forest is only a few blocks from the house where Matías spent his teenage years. At that time, packs of stray dogs stalked the streets like gangs. As children, the three brothers would often play in the thicket riddled with evergreens, eucalyptus, pines and acacias. Some 450 hectares of woods and small houses that in the 1980s were a hippie hangout where marijuana and other herbs were sold; today, it is a place with strange energy –as if a battle between darkness and light were taking place in its depths –. It inevitably brings to mind the ominous enigma of the woods in Twin Peaks.
The Duvilles were not born in Mar del Plata. They moved there – to a house originally built for vacations that ended up being their permanent residence – in the 1980s. “Those who move to the woods never leave,” inhabitants say. Even today, something of the woods continues to grow within Duville; that’s why he sows his drawings with old and fallen pine trees, tall and bare trunks rendered charcoal.
Duville’s drawings recall J.G.Ballard’s catastrophe novels. InThe Crystal World, there is a petrified forest whose surface area expands day after day due to some strange ill. The virus that is destroying the forest in the story is not of a conventional sort but one that freezes matter in a timeless state; it has slowly begun to infect humans. The threat of crystallization is a possible background for Duville’s scenes. His “still lifes,” his many rocky landscapes, are agonizing opaque gems. In Ballard’s The Drowned World, there is a character who, unlike those found in most post-apocalyptic fiction, meets the chaotic reality that awaits at the end of the world with ecstasy rather than a sense of peril. In both stories, the tone is Duvillian. In Duville’s exodus, someone has always stayed behind to record the disaster.
At three in the morning, trying to fall asleep in the bed of a hotel in front of the sea, I hear on television, “The desert encroaches on Buenos Aires.” And a few minutes later, “Water is found on the moon.” The landscape is most certainly changing.
The legacy of Humboldt
In 2003, Duville had his first solo exhibition at the Alberto Sendrós gallery. He put up his pools on silk fibers tugged to the point of producing the effect of a gnawed tapestry or an out-of-focus memory. Other landscapes were drawn on blister packs, like a fake Seurat. At that time, Duville was a timid artist, somewhat reluctant to speak of his work. Five years later, sitting in my living room, he still is. Despite his familiarity with the art world and his sudden and sustained success, the side of him that reminds me of Chance Gardener in Being There is still intact: a basically intuitive man who due to circumstances beyond his control finds himself in the art world, a place where he does not really belong but that worships him boundlessly.
In Duville’s work, there is the recurring sensation that his images are experiments, the soft side of a scientific thought. I don’t know when I found out that his younger brother, Bernardo, was a biologist, and that Pablo, his older brother, a computer geek and Carlos, his father, a chemist. I later learned that, when they were children, their father taught them how to make gunpowder in the backyard with little colored tubes, sulfur and potassium. For Duville, this contact with science would be essential. One day, after a storm, Matías went out into the yard, stepped on the grass and confirmed that there was water beneath the lawn. “It moves, it moves,” he shouted, like the ecstatic witness to a molecular transformation. They were still living in Buenos Aires at the time; his mother, Laura, was a school principal, and the house was so crammed with folders and notebooks that it was like an uncontrollable and constantly changing living being.
Sometimes Duville’s images look like metaphors at the genesis of a new scientific idea. Each drawing he formulates is based on an absurd but feasible premise: what would happen is fire burned in two directions?, how could the three states of water coexist? So he draws water in its solid, liquid and gas forms moving through an enormous trunk. But that is only a point of departure that the image soon forgets to become a national park that can be visited from some monstrous scaffolds; the trunk now looks like an enormous LHC, that particle accelerator that attempts to solve the puzzle of creation.
One day, his brother Bernardo tells me about the family experiments with music. The three brothers have a band called Príncipe de Gales [The Princes of Wales]; Bernardo keeps hundreds of crickets in a fish tank; Pablo customizes Russian synthesizers, and the small sound catastrophes populate a series of drawings by Matías. Looking at them is like seeing songs by Sonic Youth – the band that makes the most abstract Pop music I have ever heard – on paper. On the bus on the way to Mar del Plata, my ipod plays “The Diamond Sea,” twenty minutes of guitar and drum variations. That could be the title of one of Duville’s series. The song also gives off the very Duvillian impression of being a piece of automatic writing riveted with geography.
I hear:
Blood crystallized as sand
and now I hope you’ll understand
you reflected into his looking glass soul
and now the mirror is your only friend
look into his eyes and you will see t
hat men are not alone on the diamond sea
sail into the heart of the lonely storm
and tell her that you’ll love her eternally.
Isn’t that the poetic translations of a Duville drawing? Crystallization, loneliness, water, storm, fascination with death: this hypnotic movement has them all.
Strange things also happen with his materials. In one of the drawings up on the wall of his studio, a wolf dog exhales ice. The figure is drawn using so much charcoal that it appears to have a slight relief and come off the paper. “Sometimes I think I am making sculptures,” he tells me as if he could literally trap his experiment. It is likely that his materials have qualities different from the ones that we know. A few years ago, a team of scientists announced the discovery of two new elements that, in the periodic table, would be numbers 113 and 115. At that time, I remembering hearing that it might be possible to guess their properties, but no one would ever be able to predict the practical uses these elements would have. After all, who would have thought that elements like neodymium and samarium, which for a century were considered mere curiosities, would become essential to making magnets? Duville’s materials behave strangely and their uses are unimaginable. For now, they inhabit that place where some outlandish and enormous blocks of earth and water lead their strange lives.
The call of the wild
Like those traveling painters who, in the 19th century, accompanied scientists on their expeditions, in recent years Duville has registered in shorthand geographical cataclysms. His drawings test the limits of the world and its materiality. They look for a method by which to explore the last terrains. Ballard once compared his role as a writer to that of a scout, someone sent ahead to determine whether the water is potable. Looking at Duville’s works, I am surprised by how deft and original he has been at developing stories of worlds lost in his mind.
Recently, Bernardo and Matías went to Alaska. Before the trip, Matías made a series of drawings based on his fantasies about the landscape. Once there, he drew from what he saw. That second series of drawings is particularly strange. Rather than reeling him in, it is as if contact with reality had taken him to an even stranger place.
“In Alaska, nature is morbid,” Matías told me. “There are giant salmon that go to a river called Resurrection River to die. Everything seems apocalyptic.” It is inevitable: one looks at what captures one’s interest. And then: “I didn’t surf in Alaska,” he wrote me in an e-mail, “but I did skateboard on every single piece of cement by the side of the road. It was a very strange sensation: empty parking lots in the middle of nowhere and enormous mountains in the background.” Once again, the abandoned as a constant in Duville. On the way to Miramar, I go by dozens of buildings, paddleball courts, theaters, partly constructed amusement parks. I find them astonishingly eloquent about the ups-and-downs of the country. And I could swear that I had seen some of these constructions among Matías’s images. But a few days later, when at a second visit to his studio I try to find them amidst the drawings, it’s too late: everything has been altered.
As opposed to a plein air painter, Matías needs a certain blindness to be able to draw. “At a certain point, distance from nature works for me,” he says. While in the Beca Kuitca, he built a wooden room that he called Studio in the courtyard: “It was a sort of capsule with a round window. If you closed it, you were totally isolated and could imagine that you were anywhere at all.” Today, he isolates himself from Mar del Plata in a downtown apartment with a view of the block interior.
One night in my hotel room, while I am studying a creased map of Alaska with coffee stains on it, something calls my attention. An 80-kilometer stretch of desolate coastline with the words “Unexplored” burrowed on it. I ask myself if these were not the lands that Duville set out to find. And if one day someone might come upon him out there, in the middle of nowhere, enclosed in his motor home, drawing what only he can see. Would they then greet him with, “Dr. Duville, I presume?”? Note Title: This sentence was uttered by the journalist Henry Stanley in 1871 when the New York Herald sent him to search for the Scottish explorer David Livingstone, who had disappeared in Africa five years before. Stanley found him in the village of Ujiji on the banks of Lake Tanganika. The sentence Stanley said upon seeing Livingstone would become mythical: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”