Title: Matías Duville. The uncanny or ominous Author: Ines Katzenstein Place and date: Buenos Aires, 2010. Published in the book Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture: 10 Curators, 100 Contemporary Artists, 10 Sources. Phaidon Press, 2010. UK.
At the start of his career as an artist in Buenos Aires, Matías Duville decided to do without his undeniable talent as a draughtsman. As a result, he began exploring various types of image supports that would allow him to leave aside his dexterity. For example, drawings he made on swimming pool water filters: once the drawing was completed, Duville would pull out some of the support’s silk threads and in this way thin out the image, de-drawing it. There were also drawings done on rugs, which Duville would then shave to generate images of landscapes.
Combining these types of additive and subtractive processes would become one of his strenghts: to create a drawing or painting and the attacking its support until a new image, more unstable than the original, would emerge. His paintings one wood arise from the same process; once a painting is finished, Duville assaults its support with a hammer, as if the work were being devastated by an out-of-control psychotic.
The feeling of catastrophe, the uncanny or ominous within his imagery-burnt forests, hurricanes, tidal waves or gigantic burials- is intesified by these destructive processes, which seem physically to drag the work itself trough a dark force.
After spending a few years in a state of prolific experimentation, today Duville seems to have found his most successful language in the simplicity of charcoal, whether on paper or on a wall. Now, faithful to the asuterity of black on white and to fragmented and violent lines it is evident that his nightmares have become ever more intense. Through this language, he manages to achieve the perfect tension between the silent and tenebrous environments he creates and the performative urgency of his mark-making.
Duville’s favourite scenes take place within nature’s serenity, but always seem about to veer into disaster. The images in his first shows leaned towards the vertiginous, featuring cars or aeroplanes that were victims of hurricanes or tornadoes. Now his imagery is less realist- ‘invented catastrophes’ in the artist’s own words: seas that due to some impossible freezing process, become forests, caves filled with strange foliage and bonfires in the middle of abandoned grottoes, with everything pointing to a future after the catastrophe, in which there are only fragile traces of solitary survivors.