Expanding Time

The feeling that today everything is being captured and offered does not produce an effect of weariness with the consumption of images, especially of those that present natural or man-made disasters. But it does raise the doubt as to whether there will be an end to catastrophes within fictional narratives ‒ which have always appeared to be expanding ‒ when they compete with the vertiginous component that the real present incorporates.

Matías Duville’s (Buenos Aires, 1974) catastrophic scenes were never tied to a specific time, whether prehistoric, apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic. Rather, they operate on a single landscape in constant transformation, as if this were the case of a continuous and timeless present that maps a complex human condition, which might combine the visual impact derived from certain impulses, the relationship with the power of nature and its materials, the intention to understand space and disturb time, among others. Duville would say that the head is a territory vast as the sea, but not only because of the faraway plane of the horizon without precise boundaries, but because of all the diversity that it hides in its levels of depth. Drawing ‒ a technique that has, at some point, established him as one of those individuals gifted with the skill to draw a line and mesmerize the viewer ‒ might be considered an initial tool, being the most immediate one for exploring those subcranial depths: it is like the flash of a flashlight that focuses on a particular moment and place within that great and unique internal cataclysm.

As Santiago García Navarro, curator of Duville’s upcoming anthological exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, explains, his production system “is based on the constant recovery of aspects he has developed in previous series (…), which reinforces the non-linear nature of his work. Duville´s work could therefore be understood as a single oeuvre, and the idea behind it as that of a vast flow, continuous and multiple”.

The vertiginous semester Duville is going through (solo shows at Barro Gallery, Buenos Aires and Luisa Strina Gallery in Sao Paulo; anthological exhibition at Rio de Janeiro’s MAM and site-specific project for Sala Cronopios, at the Recoleta Cultural Center, Buenos Aires), offers a great opportunity to understand those continuities, mutations and flows, taking elements from the different exhibitions with the aim of reconstructing the mental map that guides the artist’s current navigation.

In real time

Within these series of exhibitions, there are two works that attract attention. On the one hand, because they are videos that record a real landscape by a master of the genre and of an almost fantastic narrative. On the other hand, because the places they feature are difficult to position within the body of the works exhibited; they can be prologues, the key to string together the different works, or simply a footnote. The first, presented at Barro, is the documentation of the piece Hogar (Home), developed by Duville as of 2011 in a ranch in La Pampa, with a potentially eternal duration. It features the two-dimensional plan, in negative, of a house that is in constant mutation: it becomes flooded, it gets dry, plants grow in it and they die, it has its own fauna and organisms; its color changes with the hours, the months and the seasons. The work addresses the power of nature and its mutations over an extended period of time and in a scale that involves microscopic detail, bearing in mind the vast emptiness of the pampas that surround the building. The following video, Escenario, proyectil (Scenario, Projectile) ‒ to be featured in the exhibition at Strina bearing the same title ‒, presents another action of nature denoting great power, but by contrast, it takes place in a vertiginous time, fleeting and rhythmical; a sublime power capable of producing immediate destruction, like an electrical storm. But these lightning and lightning bolts over the sea, filmed from a coastal town of which we can only see some signs by glimpsing at some of its buildings, are slowed down for some seconds to enable the viewer to perceive the brightness of the line of the lightning bolt or the sublime shift in light and color that lightning contributes to the context. The image is accompanied by a musical composition, a discipline that Duville shares with his brother and that he also introduced in the live exhibition at Barro.

With these two videos ‒ the slow mutation in the pampas shown at a faster speed thanks to the possibilities offered by montage, and the electrical storm slowed down to the point that it seems it might last a long time ‒ Duville does not only work with the force of nature as he has already done in his drawings, but he takes it to a plane of reality and immerses himself in complex thinking about the perception of time, emphasized not only through the introduction of music, but also intensified by the sculpture installations that accompany the videos and the different sets of drawings.

Precipitar una especie, the piece developed at Barro, is a huge line that articulates the exhibition space and links together two imagined spaces, the desert and the forest. The line ‒so ductile in his drawings ‒is a long and hard steel pipe measuring 30 centimeters in diameter, which in spite of its characteristics, has been bent at different sectors, sloping it here and there, as if this were easy to do.

Although when approaching the work it is possible to perceive the human effort and the material’s effort to achieve these torsions, it seems as though a giant or some natural power had grabbed a cactus and a pine tree from two distant spaces and had pulled at their metallic roots ‒ curiously joined together as if they formed part of a same natural world, or world of ideas ‒ so that they enter and coexist in a single space. This is therefore the union of two natural landscapes through a line of human engineering. A union that has no clearly defined time within the fiction, only the one that each plant dictates in its concrete existence; the pine tree high up in the gallery gradually losing its green color, and the cactus, closer to the ground, showing a community of bugs and organisms growing up around and inside it.

For the exhibition at Strina, Duville plans an installation derived from this previous one, but posing new questionings. A single steel pipe is bent into a unique vertex, thus making a single line that was initially a straight line come forward in the form of a V. The maker of the bend, formerly an imagined one, is now a great stone that rests upon the vertex. What closes each end of the line (and in turn comes to the forefront in this new V-shaped configuration) is one same pine tree in different stages of growth. That is, if time was conceived as a rough straight line in steel, we are now in the presence of a curved time-space thanks to the effect of a rock. From the spatial leap in an undefined time in the previous work, Duville moves on to a temporal leap within the same landscape.

This duo involved in the conception of time and space, the materials, nature and the human, is transformed into a trilogy with the never-before-exhibited piece projected for its exhibition at the MAM. A great stove made of wood fulfills its purpose at the same time that it self-destructs: it produces heat while it sacrifices itself. The material, its function, its nature and human design, its time ‘to be’ and its ‘must be’, the space it occupies and the void space it leaves: all the dimensions of the piece are superimposed here. Time folds: while it lives, it dies, it finds its existence at the same time that it self-destructs; it is natural and human, a material and a tool.

Temporal Dimensions

Following his first stage of drawings, in which Duville created a situation or landscape later to attack the support, making it a part of the work whether by devastating the plywood or fraying the silk on which he had drawn, García Navarro poses, in his text for the exhibition at the MAM, a suggestive hypothesis to read the work of the artist: “The represented and the material conditions of the representation fulfill the function of producing images rather than throwing images into a crisis. Instead of showing the non-representational mechanisms that make representation possible, pointing to the artificial nature of the latter, they tend to minimize the difference between representation and its mechanisms, generating resonances of another kind. For example, it makes it possible to think that what occurs on one plane of existence also occurs on another plane, and that what changes in a given dimension produces effects beyond this dimension”. And later he adds: “It would not be the case of uncertainty vis-à-vis two opposed and reciprocally threatening orders, but of the passage between multiple dimensions, orders, states and natures”.

Within these multiple parallel and amalgamated universes ‒ the forcing of materials and the production of content, the single landscape and the exploration of different techniques and disciplines, among others ‒ it is interesting to highlight, in these recent works by Duville, the play between the dimensions of the real and of fiction, and the potential for each of these dimensions to produce effects on the other, as García Navarro has already remarked. The truth is that Duville´s fantastic images related to disasters, the power of nature, fusions and mutations between what is natural and what is man-made, are becoming increasingly balanced with reality. The latter no longer appears merely as the trace of an action on a concrete material fused with a fictional narrative but as a document or account of the real itself, for instance in the previously mentioned video or the installations containing plants or materials that produce a concrete story or event.

The advance of technology not only caused the dimensions of fiction and reality to intercross or become confused, but also that we have a different perception of time based on hyperconnectivity, as if all of time and space were occurring simultaneously and within our reach. The artist’s journey across dimensions seems to become the narrative core in the installations featured at Barro, Strina and the MAM, where we find a more quantic Duville, as if he were playing to be Schrödinger’s cat with the forest and the desert, or as if he were giving a visual example of the relativity of time via the rock on the line that connect temporalities.

The great specific project that the artist will carry out at the Recoleta Center will be the basis for starting a new cartography. A great natural topography in asphalt once again combines natural and urban, hard and soft dimensions. Two spaces merge through the form and the material; multiverses that seem to come together in a horizon of events or in the teleportation machine in Cronenberg’s The Fly: another way of beginning to think the problem of our present, once again.

Exhibitions:

Precipitar una especie . 18.11.14 through 20.12.14. Barro Arte Contemporáneo. Buenos Aires, Argentina

Escenario, proyectil. As of February 28. Luisa Strina Gallery. Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Matías Duville. Mutaçoes (Mutations). As of March 14.Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro. Brazil.

Mid-May, title still undefined, at the sala Cronopios, Recoleta Cultural Center.