Matías Duville – Life in an instant

14.03 — 26.04 / 2014
Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris

Matías Duville grew up between ocean and forest. He observes, carries out experiments and fantasies about two territories invoking simultaneously the sublime, fear and danger. Feelings that are not contradictory, but complimentary, and which penetrate his work. His monochromatic charcoal drawings present a tormented and threatening nature. The ante- and post-apocalyptic landscapes surrounded by steep and improbable edges forecast a sudden mutation. They are marked by cracks, craters, abysses, extrusions, trails and devastating waves. In-between empty spaces and loaded formations, light and darkness, presence and absence, reality and fiction, the artist immerses us at the heart of an enigmatic world. Ours? The answer is not simple. Man’s footprints are rare, traces of civilisation stubbornly remain at the bottom of a décor where nature has reasserted itself. A catastrophe has taken place, or is about to: a tornado, a tsunami, an eruption, a brutal climate change. Everything that is familiar to us is suddenly swept away by sprawling and ruthless phenomena. The world we are accustomed to is on the verge of disappearing. The uncanny theorised by Freud takes on its full meaning here. The drawings made of sharp, abrupt and incisive strokes translate a desire to sculpt the landscape: to dig, to roam and tear the earth, to intertwine roots, to shape arches, to carve rocks, to hang the sea, to split the sky. A dialogue is then established with his 3-dimensional work. A charred wooden fireplace (Fireplace – 2011), a table presenting a salt landscape, hooks and broken glass (under realisation) constitute what remains after the impact. Domestic elements represent ruins of a suddenly fleeing humanity. Fire and water have swept away everything. Only traces have resisted this violent and irreversible wave. With these unidentified spaces, Matías Duville brings back Nature’s forces in all its extremes. Unease and fascination are combined. It allows him to shape the notion of thresholds (delimiting dream from nightmare) and limits (temporal and spatial) by exploring an inhospitable world where bearings are turned upside down. Immersed in chaos, we are driven by the convulsive imagination of the artist who is both author and translator of an angry nature.

Julie Crenn