Matías Duville
16 Jun - 30 Jul 2009
MATÍAS DUVILLE
“Safari en el crepúsculo”
June 16 - July 30, 2009
Under the title Safari en el crepúsculo (Safari at Dusk), young Argentinian artist Matías Duville (1974) exhibits his works at Galería Distrito 4 in Madrid. This series of pieces eloquently reflect his artistic activity, mainly focused on drawings made with different mediums, like walls, silks, paper, plywood, etc. Duville’s drawings feel like the aftermath of a dream, an outcome of impossible trips and desolate landscapes in which the absence of human life evokes that dream-like condition prompted by children’s tales or stories from a distant past, often involving natural catastrophes: hurricanes, rivers overflowing, and so forth. These successive ideas have brought about a concatenation of drawings that accurately mirror Duville’s convulsed creation.
These narrated and imagined landscapes unfold into a multitude of anecdotes in which thunder unexpectedly irrupts, hurricanes sweep cars along, natural laws are altered, as if they were not of this planet. Among the multiple events represented, fire moves to watery rhythms, light has the power of wind, and the waves freeze like objects we had put into a freezer. Duville’s anthropomorphic trees, recurrent in his works, are about desolation and pain. At first instance, it is like facing apocalyptic scenes: hurricanes, avalanches of tree trunks, accidents, floods... There’s a long list of tragedies.
However, such a factual list does not thoroughly cover the range of this young artist’s imagery. Far from digging his heels into the world of reality, Duville consigns his catastrophes to an alien, fantastic plane, and sets them apart from their own tragic nature. He transfers an objective, real-world reference to the possibility of an impossible world. His is a giddy and naive gaze.
In this new cosmogony, things are not as they were anymore. This is a world in constant change, and places sometimes swap for each other with unforeseeable consequences. This chaos is not disorder or confusion for the philosopher, but the abyss that every living thing has behind it – and whose rules for order we cannot altogether embrace. Because Duville’s world, while tragic, is also orderly, calm, gentle. Hence its naivety – an acknowledging look that mesmerises the viewer. In his most recent drawings, the destructive gesture transfers to the very space of the representation. Thus Duville asserts art as a generating force, able to create a world: “...a planet not unlike ours, in which chaos has another meaning or its own laws, while being similar. Anything can happen there”.
“Safari en el crepúsculo”
June 16 - July 30, 2009
Under the title Safari en el crepúsculo (Safari at Dusk), young Argentinian artist Matías Duville (1974) exhibits his works at Galería Distrito 4 in Madrid. This series of pieces eloquently reflect his artistic activity, mainly focused on drawings made with different mediums, like walls, silks, paper, plywood, etc. Duville’s drawings feel like the aftermath of a dream, an outcome of impossible trips and desolate landscapes in which the absence of human life evokes that dream-like condition prompted by children’s tales or stories from a distant past, often involving natural catastrophes: hurricanes, rivers overflowing, and so forth. These successive ideas have brought about a concatenation of drawings that accurately mirror Duville’s convulsed creation.
These narrated and imagined landscapes unfold into a multitude of anecdotes in which thunder unexpectedly irrupts, hurricanes sweep cars along, natural laws are altered, as if they were not of this planet. Among the multiple events represented, fire moves to watery rhythms, light has the power of wind, and the waves freeze like objects we had put into a freezer. Duville’s anthropomorphic trees, recurrent in his works, are about desolation and pain. At first instance, it is like facing apocalyptic scenes: hurricanes, avalanches of tree trunks, accidents, floods... There’s a long list of tragedies.
However, such a factual list does not thoroughly cover the range of this young artist’s imagery. Far from digging his heels into the world of reality, Duville consigns his catastrophes to an alien, fantastic plane, and sets them apart from their own tragic nature. He transfers an objective, real-world reference to the possibility of an impossible world. His is a giddy and naive gaze.
In this new cosmogony, things are not as they were anymore. This is a world in constant change, and places sometimes swap for each other with unforeseeable consequences. This chaos is not disorder or confusion for the philosopher, but the abyss that every living thing has behind it – and whose rules for order we cannot altogether embrace. Because Duville’s world, while tragic, is also orderly, calm, gentle. Hence its naivety – an acknowledging look that mesmerises the viewer. In his most recent drawings, the destructive gesture transfers to the very space of the representation. Thus Duville asserts art as a generating force, able to create a world: “...a planet not unlike ours, in which chaos has another meaning or its own laws, while being similar. Anything can happen there”.