Exhibition "Cenizas de Mañana" by Matias Duville

The body of the woman (or perhaps it is a man, Matias Duville himself cannot say) who, sitting on the mountains, observes the sparse procession of boats approaching her, is “crossed by the landscape”. Human figures are almost completely absent from the Argentine artist's universe, and it is significant that when they appear, as in Ciencia Folk (2024), they are “on another plane, not exactly there”. The most curious aspect of this absence is that in most of Duville's works, be they paintings, drawings or installations, the landscape is deserted, but the traces of human passage and action are everywhere: cut trees, objects in disuse, architecture obsolescent, everything indicates that someone was there and actively participated in the construction of the scenario that we can now observe. The artist's place is also that of someone who has just arrived, who observes things and describes them. The first impression, when faced with these landscapes, is that the artist is representing, with the aim of creating a blunt and inescapable critique from an ecological perspective, a post-apocalyptic world, in which the worst predictions (all of them, By the way, more plausible every day) have become reality. But the artist's own relationship with the universe that he has been representing for almost thirty years is more complex, and certainly “cannot be reduced to the desire to represent what is happening to the planet”.

Despite the stylistic changes and the predilection, at different stages of his career, for drawing, installation or painting, it can be said that the landscape that appears in his works is the same. It is as if the observer has come across, over the years, “frames from a film that portrays this landscape”. None of the paintings, in this sense, can be considered completely isolated from the others, and much less can it be assumed that any of the works in the exhibition or, on a larger scale, in Duville's production as a whole, can portray this landscape. What we see is what the artist is seeing at that moment, what the camera of his mind observes. They are fragments, flashes of an “infinite space, almost like the depths of a mind, something unfathomable”. The size of the challenge of reproducing a world is reflected in the scale of the work. If it is not unusual, in the panorama of contemporary artistic production, to see large installations and paintings, it is rarer to see drawings of the scale often adopted by Duville. The artist considers drawing to be a more physical medium than painting: “drawing is very hands-on”, he says, while “painting is more fluid”. Perhaps it is exactly this fluidity that makes the works brought together in this exhibition vibrate in a way that is very different from most drawings, almost always made in shades of red or black. On the other hand, this same fluidity makes paintings less physical than drawings. And this lack of physicality is perhaps what gives rise to the blows, the marks of strikes on the surface of the painting that give “hand” to the works and make these paintings eminently Duvillian works, in the sense that they not only bring the representation of a world that already is familiar to us, but also the anguish of a latent, inescapable violence.

When starting a new work, the artist rarely carries out preparatory studies or sketches. The most common is to start from an idea, from an almost narrative or even literary motto, “a bridge that melts, a frozen wave, a climate that is both cold and tropical…”. From there, the scene emerges without its author knowing exactly how or having total control over what happens. If, in the case of installations, the presence of materials such as iron or asphalt brings a familiarity that the work needs to subvert, in two-dimensional works the viewer is completely immersed in this parallel universe. Everything is profoundly different from what we know, and at the same time intimately familiar. Even the artist sometimes wonders, “Where is this? I like not recognizing myself, not knowing who did this. When I try to plan what I'm going to do, I usually end up not liking the result.” Despite having developed, over the years, working methods and strategies, such as introducing “a pile of stones, some trees” or other elements that help him “advance over the terrain”, the artist remains in an undefined position, of someone who can be both creator and observer: “I'm exploring this environment together with the observer, I don't have control over it”. The idea of ​​joint exploration of an unknown territory moves us further away from the reductionist view of work as a critique of the effects of the Anthropocene. On the contrary, the feeling is that there is no univocal value judgment: catastrophic events for a specific civilization or ecosystem may not be of the slightest relevance or even be beneficial for countless others. We are just beginning to explore Matias Duville's peculiar universe, we still can't know what is good and what is not, what unfolded as we could wish and what followed other logics, based on decisions and discretions about which We have no control. For now, we watch. It may be that at some point things will become clearer, but it may also be that they won't.

Service
Exhibition | Cenizas de Mañana
From August 10th to September 19th
Tuesday to Friday, from 10am to 19pm, and Saturday, from 10am to 17pm