DUPLO VÊ
Mattia Denisse
Curator: Catarina Alfaro
29 September to 13 November 2016
Exhibition prolonged until 27th of November
2016
DUPLO VÊ is at once the extended name for the letter W in
Portuguese, and also alludes to the 'double vision' of a cross-eyed
god. Taking the idea of a 'divine eye impairment' as his starting
point, Denisse looks at the enigma involved in understanding the
world: are things simply the way that they are (regardless of how
we see them), or is reality infinitely intangible and
mysterious?
His 'asymptotic' stories - which are told through drawings a
set of 257 drawings arranged across 18 tables, made in a variety of
styles, from figuration to schematic simplification -
co-exist and are displayed alongside one another, albeit with
differing degrees of closeness. Yet they do, in fact, make
reference to one another, despite the apparent lack of any logical
sequence. Duplo Vê (2016) - a series of drawings created especially
for this exhibition - is like a final chapter that brings all of
the narrative threads back together again, weaving them into their
essential form.
These stories, stemming from quite different origins and never
merging, nonetheless end up seeping into one another, thus opening
up the possibility of a narrative that is largely driven by the
artist himself, represented with and through his double (doublé).
This imaginative projection creates a somewhat ghostly and
changeable character at the heart of the narrative, who takes on
myriad points of view in different stories. There is the erudite
visiting lecturer on the cusp of revealing the meaning of the
universe to the primitive savage, the chess player, the writer and
the geographer, to name but a few. The double simply reflects the
idea that cuts across the whole exhibition: the apparent
duplication of reality.