By Jessica Dawson
Special to The Washington Post
Saturday, April 14, 2007

Until the end of April, a rented downtown space holds a month-long exhibition hosted by a gallery of no fixed address. Called Douz and Mille, the gallery exists, in a manner of speaking, online and in the rented booths of the global art fairs. Its only permanent home is an Internet site.

With "Tomás Rivas: Left to My Own Devices," gallery owner Rody Douzoglou (hence the "Douz") has made a rare effort to mount an exhibition that runs the length of most traditional shows -- in this case, the month of April -- and holds regular public open hours. ("Mille" derives from the last name of a former partner.)

Douzoglou counts herself among a new crop of dealers who no longer require a physical space to "own" a gallery. Situated somewhere between a private dealership and a brick-and-mortar establishment, Douz and Mille arises out of some recent changes in the art world.

One is the rise of the Internet as a vehicle for showing artwork, facilitating its sale and publicizing artists. The second is a proliferation of art fairs. When the fairs touch down for a long weekend in London or Miami, dealers are nearly guaranteed binge buying. Ask even those gallerists who oversee permanent spaces and they'll tell you that the real money gets made on the road.

This convergence of events has spawned a gallery that avoids almost all the costs of rent and utilities; essentially, overhead is plane fare. It sounds like a dream but brings with it new problems -- the biggest being how to show an artist in depth or in context.

This month, Douz and Mille can, perhaps, mitigate these issues for at least one of its artists by showing his work in the E Street NW space formerly occupied by Numark. Douzoglou has hosted a few traditional exhibitions at the downtown venue Flashpoint and, more recently, at a museum in Venezuela. Mostly, though, Douz and Mille artists exist via mass e-mails and announcements of their gallery's booth location at upcoming art fairs.

The Venezuelan-born Douzoglou, 50, came to dealing fairly recently. Trained as an economist, she signed up to be a National Gallery of Art docent about 10 years ago. She learned fast and decided to immerse herself in the work of up-and-coming artists, many from Latin America. Her first shows were held in her suburban Maryland home in 2004. The next year, she was accepted to her first art fair, London's Scope. From there, invitations to participate in other fairs started coming. By virtue of meeting one fair's selection criteria, she earned legitimacy as a dealer.

Being a small operation, Douz and Mille finds its welcome in the adjunct fairs, like Scope, that orbit big fairs such as New York's Armory Show or Art Basel Miami Beach. Between October of 2005 and December of last year, Douzoglou sold work at three Scope fairs in three different cities.

That Douz and Mille will exist in the real world for this month -- her current show runs to April 30 -- is of particular moment. The show she hosts, sculptural works by Tomás Rivas referencing the enduring forms of classical architecture, seems a fitting, if ironic, subject. Indeed, Rivas's medium is drywall, the cheap and quick structural element encasing the art fair booth.

In "Left to My Own Devices," the Chilean-born Rivas carves both directly into the gallery drywall and onto four-foot-square panels of the stuff, which hang on the walls as paintings would.

Rivas's carvings are based on 19th-century architectural drawings by French Beaux-Arts architects who visited Greece and Rome. As part of their education, those architects copied, and sometimes imaginatively re-created, the most revered ancient edifices. A century earlier, the practice had political ramifications: Buildings were built that borrowed Greek forms, their eminent logic expected to impart judicious vibes to Enlightenment France. That Rivas borrowed ancient ornament, which itself was lifted by Enlightenment architects, serves to underscore the duplicative nature of the Douz and Mille undertaking.

And it doesn't stop there. Rivas projects these images of Corinthian columns and meander patterns onto his drywall at oblique angles, tracing and then cutting the patterns in. A formerly erect temple slopes rightward. A rosette elongates into an oval. This is funhouse-mirror classical.

Rivas uses everyday penknives to cut his designs. As he goes, he exposes layers of the drywall, which consists of two sheets of heavy paper encasing a thick layer of plaster. In some areas the artist peels up exposed paper so that it curls, adding additional flourish to an acanthus leaf. In other areas he allows brittle plaster to crack and fall to the floor, mimicking a crumbling ruin.

Though the show consists mostly of "canvases," Rivas carved one work directly into the gallery wall. In it, a meander pattern snakes down the wall, bumping into a line of acanthus leaves. The work's mix of violence and playfulness is very much attuned to the space and works well here. Of course, some drywall is going to need replacing come April 30.

Douzoglou says she's using the cycle of constantly changing venues to her advantage. Every new space, borrowed or rented, will accommodate some artists better than others. Douzoglou thinks the current digs suit Rivas's work perfectly. Other artists in her stable, however, may not work so well. "I don't know if other artists would fit here," she says.

Seems the permanent gallery, so painstakingly designed to accommodate as many media and ideas as possible, may prove an inflexible thing of the past. If all artists could show in spaces best suited to their work, what heaven that would be.

Problem is, most other Douz and Mille artists are stuck showing in booths 10 to 20 feet wide that are packed with people and art. That's not an ideal space for contemplation.

But if the main goal is the sale -- and that's what the roving art fairs seem to indicate -- why worry about context? Just sell the work off the wall and hang more. Hang as much as people are willing to buy.

Tomás Rivas: Left to My Own Devices at Douz and Mille, 625-27 E St. NW, Tuesday-Sunday noon-6 p.m., to April 30. 301-980-9574. http://www.douzandmille.com.