The nostalgia of the future Luiz Camillo Osorio. (MAM)RIO. 2015.
I really hesitated before accepting an invitation to write about the work of Matías Duville, and getting started was not an easy task. The contact I had with it did not seem to be enough, in spite of the conversations I had with Santiago García Navarro. While hesitating, I came upon reflections by Derrida in his “Memoirs of the Blind”. In this work, the author sets an interesting comparison between drawing and being unable to see, highlighting how the process of drawing is based on inherent invisibility. To quote Valéry, who says “Sometimes I think, and sometimes I am”, we could also say “Sometimes I see, and sometimes I draw” when following the lines of a drawing on paper. Also in the light of Derrida, the origin of drawing lies in the myth of Butades, which says that painting was invented to fulfill a yearning for a lover who left, whose face profile was traced on a wall. Therefore, it is at the roots of drawing that perception enables memory and presence is replaced with absence.
After this intertextual interpretation, I felt motivated to face such a challenge. These works are produced by intense, repetitive, accurate movement of the hands, connected to (or motivated by) an uneasy, creative mind. They showcase fluid lines created mainly by rhythm rather than shape. More of a Matisse than a Picasso, we were to compare them. Our eyes do not stop at any details, but rather move through the surface guided by graphic inventive narratives not at all soothing. An apocalyptic nature inhabited by pre-Adamic beings and residues/ruins of humanless human intervention.
When facing a world haunted by its demise, where the planet becomes increasingly threatened by excessive rather than scarce rationality, putting your hands and imagination to work is how we can see what has not been seen, how we can catch a glimpse of what vanishes because of the lust of the destructive machine of technocapitalism. In these drawings, everything is real and everything is fiction. Memory is replaced with a type of apocalyptic clairvoyance. Subtle and calm apocalypse, where things are swallowed with no pain and drama. Human absence eliminates our protagonism from the future. It also seems to display our helplessness before environmental disaster and our thorough inability to understand our power of destruction. In a recent interview about the end of the world and environmental crisis, anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and philosopher Déborah Danovski pointed out that we live an “anti-utopia” in our contemporary world. To a certain extent, I feel tormented by this concept when looking at Duville’s drawings. This is how Viveiros explains this idea:
“An utopian is a person who can imagine a better world but is unable to achieve it for not knowing which methods to use or how to do it. We are becoming the opposite of that. Our society has the technical ability to create unimaginable things. We are able to create an atomic bomb, but we are unable to think it through. Günther Anders explores this interesting concept of subliminal phenomena in the realm of biological perception, those ideas that exist below our perception line. Like when you hear something so low that you do not know what you heard; or when you see something, but you do not know what you saw, like subtle color distinctions. These are literally subliminal phenomena, below our perception ability. According to Anders, we are now creating something new: the supraliminal, something so big we can’t either see it or imagine it. Climate crisis is one of those things.”
It is not about imagining what threatening disasters lie ahead of us. They are already here. However, there is something about it that is impossible to represent or imagine. What these drawings express is some kind of shock before a worldless future, where there is an unstoppable dynamic of natural forces after complete annihilation. We become disconnected from representation and narrative since there is no longer any cohesion between space and time, when gravity and scale are distorted, when calm is sublime and movement is pathetic. These drawings are borderline laughter rather than tears.
Thus, not everything is a disaster. They carry a certain ethics of helplessness. When nothing can be done, drawings are not projects but pleasure. In Matías Duville’s work, the act of drawing reinforces a resistance to time and to ever-expanding slower temporality, which refuses to allow visibility to be reduced to what it showcases. The helplessness of lines is the power of time, a delay through strokes. When it comes to these drawings, what we realize by paying attention to them is worldlessness, obliteration of experience, suffering and abandon before a lust for power that seems to have finally annihilated even lust for excessive power itself. The act of drawing is the act of promoting less and less: less ambition, less growth, less wealth, less power. Duville’s drawings celebrate the perfect moment for the hand, for the act, for fragility, for storytelling. A fragile storytelling that explores separation between drawings as lines and drawings as purpose. Just loose lines, which do not interfere, do not long for the future, but do transform line into blur, and blur into void. Again, experience that is impossible to experience, or perhaps clairvoyance without experience.
When faced with impending end, the feeling that our time can no longer be represented, that nothing else represents us, when we no longer see any future beyond an apocalyptic context, we witness lines losing their trace in the texture of plastic pages from photo albums (as in the untitled body of work from 2003, executed with this kind of material). His hesitant hand does not strongly outline, his eyes flinch without boundaries between internal and external. Before mindless eyes, these specific drawings could show the ripples of impressionism, perhaps even pointillism. This is only a formal comparison though. This affectionate tone is the opposite: in those paintings, what we see are pulses of light and longing for movement, for thereby time is frozen and light is dim.
Upon comparing some drawings from the Data. Bengala series to the photographs of the Alaska series, it may appear we are always facing an outrageous situation, where nothing is nature and nothing is culture, everything seems to be misplaced and every place is full of nostalgia of the future. This may be the affectionate tone that we see throughout Duville’s poetics – a nostalgia of the future. Extreme uneasiness with an entropy caused by excessive civilization. But as Hölderlin says, where the danger is, also grows the saving power. Maybe the news here is that salvation is lost – God is dead. While we wait for the end, only drawing without purpose is left, lines that can no longer see, that no longer know how to see, that went blind, nomad and free. This line is a trace, and its blindness is not absence, but the possibility of clairvoyance and the freedom to experiment.
Luiz Camillo Osorio – Professor of Aesthetics at PUC-Rio’s Philosophy Department since 2009, Curator at Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art.