Barbara Lanati
Una Storia plasmata nella cera

[...] They are screen prints on paraffin in paraffin. As a series the work looks at our European history, which is the background and the scene of the first four decades of the twentieth century. With fragments of images, they roam the Spanish Civil War and Nazi Germany. Synecdochically they encircle these topics: news photos and archival photographs, altered and counterfeit documents, stills of those years that the artist Markus Döhne did not experience himself because of his age.

[...] It is a poor material, as are those decades of which Döhne speaks: unstable, perishable, but capable of appearing in the iconographic nakedness of the pieces on which photo frames appear to record the indelible of those crystallizing moments and figures held inside. The so created blocks of Döhne, which are disturbing findings that strictly line themselves up closely to each other, tell us how far those years seem to those who are born after the Second World War, yet, at the same time, how perversely close, immersed like a claw in the unconscious and in the memory of who searches to „drive out“ its memory. The blocks seem to be more amber than paraffin, inside with sealed fragments of wood and small insects, reminders of the distance of our origins: the story before the story, the story of the fulfilled present, which, in addition to rhetoric and literature, has branded a whole generation with blood that has been born after the Holocaust. It is that generation that now demands not to forget and look closely at the obscene spectacle of a period in European history — where it seemed impossible to make art — as Susan Sontag expressed in her still valid text Against Interpretation twenty years ago.
 
[...] Döhne works on memory and its extinction, the weight of memory and its potential, partly reprocessing, and, thereby taking position of the one who accepts the wounds left by history in the body of the collective imagination. Going beyond the actual tragedy of history, key terms of the vocabulary are being formed which will construct the language of today. This is done in a similar way as the two masters, who, as it appears to me, can be recognized in the background of Döhne’s work — Duchamp and Warhol — knew to do it in their time: the former perhaps with greater sobriety and irony, while the latter with intentional, paranoid formal concessions.
Translated by Gisela Pauli Caldas