Matias Duville

An asphalt parking lot with the characteristics of a surface composed of sand and sand dunes. In this way, the artist once again establishes a dialogue between the terms culture and nature in a combination that offers the possibility for them to coexist or confront one another within the same body. “I am interested in what the mind sees when it sees this,” Duville – who also refers to the installation as a “mental topography” – points out. The mind reappears when it reflects on the ensemble of eleven drawings, whose title is Edificio (Building), displayed in another sector of the same exhibition room: “Each drawing is like the spearhead of an expansion of the mental map.” Drawing, the central core of his work since the beginning of his career in the 1990s, emerges once again in this show and in small format. In one of the drawings we find a volcano in black and white from which a curved cone giving up a pale blue smoke seems to pop up; in another one, we see some palm tree silhouettes (or are they fireworks?) that emerge from a dark background; still in another one, we see a sphere that seems to contain a lanscape of palm trees, rolling down a descending line; in another black and white drawing, a pine tree appears in the midst of a dark night, covering with its branches a part of the large white moon. Thus, Duville transfers onto the plane or onto the three­dimensional space the mental map of motifs that characterize his oeuvre, which we might consider simple from the figurative point of view: sand dunes, trees, houses, planets, volcanoes, mountains. But this simplicity is only apparent in his work, because it plays with the limits between reality and fantasy, between time and timelessness, between figure and background, between movement and immobility, between small and big, solid and liquid, exterior and interior. And it is in that limit, uncertain and relaxed, that his works attain their full power and fascination.

After viewing the drawings, we observe the installation Arena Parking once again and perceive that, in spite of its dimensions, it is small in relation to a sand dune, static in relation to sand, too wavy for a parking lot, and that it may belong to this present time, or to a very remote past on Earth, or to a landscape from some other world. But there is still the third work in this exhibition, in another sector of the room; it is a video, – Escenario, proyectil (Stage, Projectile) – the music for which the artist composed together with his brother, Pablo. At the beginning, small luminous dots that twinkle like stars against a dark sky – as dark as the asphalt in the central installation – appear on the screen. Suddenly, lightning illumines the scene and we notice that we are watching a storm over the sea. The images in the video – in slow motion – also find their connection with the drawings in terms of color, line or atmosphere. We do not know where the storm is occurring or when, in spite of the fact that we can catch a glimpse of some blurry buildings. And so we penetrate deeper and deeper into the world proposed by the artist, a world that is both known and unknown, mysteriou and revealing, remote and close.