José Ignacio Maldonado
Markus Döhne – El congelador

Markus Döhne, the freezer. – The sober yet confusing work of Markus Döhne holds a whole range of elements and dissonant processes that it is difficult to put it into words. Therefore I rather begin, faced with the alternative, by expressing my confusion.

One thing I would like to say in advance: Notice the two reviews which I have identified and defended: The work is sober, because in a surprising cold-bloodedness it shows such disturbing scenes that we are compelled to see in the selection of the images a section, an autopsy. Then, the work is confusing, because it throws the viewer off track because by changing the cut the boundary is renewed, because the original path of the photographic shot is deflected.

I will try an explanation: Markus Döhne has set himself the task not to analyze, not to recycle. He removes rather the collective unconscious. No more, no less! His photographic reproductions go back to images that are ours in one way or another. Worse still: They are images of history, to which we already belong, and with which we were inoculated as a possessive and us owning heritage.

Lets take one example: the material for Autorretrato del fotógrafo [Self-portrait of the Photographer] is a photo unknown to me which Che Guevara took of himself after partly changing his appearance by shaving and cutting his hair. Thus unnoticed and with a bogus pass he crossed the border to Bolivia. Those who know that passport photo will be quite amazed, because here in the hotel room the thick goggles are missing and Che's look is full of determination. Somebody thought of withholding that amazement from me – this is what I now do to you – by revealing the identity of the self-portrayal. But I am sure that this riddle – and that's what Markus creates again and again: riddles – sooner or later, maybe in twenty years, would have cleared up by itself in my memory.

I repeat: the glasses are missing, but there are many amazing signs: the view of the warrior – and that means: that of death –, the burning cigar – not cigarettes –, at which he draws on purpose because of the solemn or unceremonious event, the messiness of the hotel room, of the background, the casual attitude of the shoulders, the almost random angle of the snapshot ... et cetera.

All right: The work of this great graphic artist must not be confused with the succession of anecdotal events. That would be a mistake. The material, the selection of a haunting (historical, clinical and collective unconscious) image and its new form, its re-selection of a part of what it says, of the secret, all this allows for the emergence of a new, but frighteningly familiar result, the detonator of an impossible, strange and yet own paradoxical memory. Nothing more, nothing less. Döhne’s confusing paradoxes.

I regret that I will not succeed to comment on Döhne’s works made with wax. For here there is no paper but only paraffin and silk-screened pigment. But you certainly know how to appreciate – with inevitable astonishment – how such a method freezes both the pieces from history alien to us as well as our beholding hearts into ice. May your most inner self rejoice at it.

     Guanajuato, 3 February 1998

Translated by Gisela Pauli Caldas