Title: Matías Duville. Author: Victoria Noorthoorn. Place and date: Buenos Aires, 2007. Published in the book Matías Duville, Obras 2000-2007.
Man is about to throw himself upon the whole earth and its atmosphere, to usurp and to subject, under the guise of “power,” the secret kingdom of nature and to submit the course of history to the planning and mastery of a planetary government. This same “rebellious man” is not in conditions to simply say what it is, to say what it means that a thing is. Martin Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track (1950)
A giant, frozen wave. Anthropomorphic trees dive into a lake. The possibility of holding a slice of the world in your hand. The possibility of grasping the world from somewhere else, faraway. The scenes that Matías Duville builds in his drawings in diverse materials are impossible. At first they look familiar, but they take the viewer to an other world.
Duville moves in and pulls away. He tugs at his own drawing (heeding the two meanings of that word, to render an image and to pull or remove) and, in this tensing, he carefully rips silk threads from swimming pool filters -the support for his drawings from 2003-, the wood shavings in his works from 2006, or the rough crayon, whose wax strokes disintegrate as the lines move over the paper. In this tugging and ripping of material, Duville constructs a world of destruction. At first, we seem to be before apocalyptic scenes: hurricanes, avalanches of tree trunks, accidents, floods -a list of ongoing tragedies.
Yet, this factual list does not exhaust the young artist’s imaginary. Far from placing himself in the world of the real, Duville locates his catastrophes in a distant, fantastical plane, and thus strips them of their tragic nature. He effects a transference from the objective reference of the real world to the possibility of an impossible world. He endows his drawings with a paradox that is, perhaps, related to the one Berger formulated in relation to Magritte: “To destroy familiar experience he needed to use the language of the familiar.” This gaze is vertiginous and full of candour. Vertiginous not only due to the iconography it employs, but also due to where the artist places himself in order to imagine these scenes. What place allows for the imaginary to develop? Where can the artist find the freedom necessary to navigate another, parallel world of his own creation?, and take it to the ultimate consequences? We might think that this is a place akin to Berger’s Magritte, for whom “Behind the parts and through their interstices we imagine an impossible freedom.” It might be like the lower layer or chaos that Castoriadis referred to as the power of formation through which imagination emerges in recognizable forms. A chaos which is not disorder or confusion, but rather the abyss that lies behind everything that exists, and whose order we can not grasp.
Indeed, Duville’s world, though tragic, is orderly, calm, and kind. Hence, its hypnotizing link to the viewer. In his early drawings, the movement of a single element -a thread- suffices to reveal the whole, the landscape. In his more recent work, the destructive gesture is transferred to the very space of representation. Hence, Duville affirms art as a generating force, capable of creating a world: “…a planet similar to our own where chaos has its own -if similar- laws and another sense. Anything can happen there.”
In this new cosmogony, things’ way of being shifts; behavior is different, and things act through transition, like when one material reacts with another’s qualities. A hard blow on a metal surface gives rise to aquatic waves. Like a gust of wind, a bright light drags along stones, trunks and even buildings. Smoke takes on water’s slow and thick movement. This is a constantly shifting world, whose transferences from place to place have unforeseeable consequences.
Duville’s drawings make reference to a private world of fantasy, where memory and dream, the known and the surprising, intersect. They postulate a pause, an enigma, and an absence. What is the shape of the universe’s creative power? He proposes a frozen image of what can happen at the instant the world becomes image or is conceived as objective image by the artist, now the point of reference. (In the end, Duville does not move away. His simple material resources bring the imaginary journey back to the close-at-hand, to the environment where mirage and credibility are explicitly impossible. The work is firmly rooted in the space of fiction, and from there it stretches out again.