Matías Duville

Alaska and Mar del Plata are destinations which are blurred in the works. The essence tends to disappear in the photographs and to reappear in the drawings, reduced to some firm and schematic gestures. The artist rescues forms, rhythms, atmospheres, sensations, without ever reaching abstraction, attached to an ambiguous narration.

The incisive emphasis of the line, the power and identity of the strokes, are recognizable features. Duville has style.

But beyond the command of the craft and the display of energy, there are qualities which the artist unveils. There are the tides with desynchronized waves, the movement of some grasslands or the curve of a branch. Nothing new. It is the secret of Van Gogh’s undulating wheat fields and convoluted cypresses. It is just about seeing and highlighting peculiarities.

Duville is intuitive. About the sense of the photographs, he notes “I wanted photographs in black and white, it seemed to me that the sound came in better”, and he adds that his pulse and his ear functioned at the same time.

The exhibition’s curator, Santiago García Navarro, warns that the photos end up resembling the drawings, that the lens detects elements of Duville’s oeuvre in the landscape, and not the other way around, as was to be expected. That is, the stony grounds, the mountains and the monkey-puzzle trees resemble the stony grounds, the mountains and the monkey-puzzle trees that the artist has been painting for years.

Everything converges in the exhibition. Even the primitive aspect of the drawing coincides with Duville’s rough and reserved identity. Neither the lines nor the words flow loose and light, they are rather built with impulses. “The narration emerges alone, without a prior image”, says the artist. Indeed, there is a touch of inspiration, of intuition and of romantic irrationality.

The landscapes painted with mud have the opaque quality of the charred sienna earth. Hotel Palmera is an islet swept away by the flood; its name, charged with resonances, contrasts with the image of desolation: the fragile remains of an abandoned building. The tragedy of a world that is being destroyed, nevertheless compensated by the power of the artist´s drawing, with its powerful gesture of existential affirmation.