David Perez
Markus Döhne

In connection with the exposition of TAC — TALLER D‘ART CONTEMPORANI in Valencia in early summer 1990, we had the opportunity of getting a first contact to the work of German artist Markus Döhne (Limburg 1961). On this occasion he showed, among other things, a remarkable screen print — Tatlintransmitted. Dedicado al pueblo de Valencia de la Tercera Republica — This work highlighted political connections and still had a constructive, comprehensive, and bewildering, alienating language. After this first contact with the Spanish public Döhne returns to our country with a sober and concise solo exhibition at the gallery Val i 30, in which he refrains from the usual taxonomic classifications (sculpture, space, installation ...) and in which he primarily attempts to introduce ourselves to a frozen collection of images that participates in many different ways at the mentioned media, without, however, be caught in them.

Starting from a clear and simple room layout Döhne shows five series of screenprints in paraffin-carriers, which are again on metal structures. Excluding the use of other artistic means the images selected by the German artist process an iconic universe of history, in this case European history, some moments of which are captured by the device of the deformable and perishable wax in a fragile and contradictory way. Markus Döhne himself explained the meaning of his work: „What interests me is history, or rather the memory of history. How does collective memory, propaganda, work? What meaning and what influence do known altered photographs take in the course of time?“

Knowing this we understand the intentions of our artist as a formulation of an interplay of timely tensions between images that we possess, though, second-hand, of experienced acts and a potential reality of those acts. In this sense, the vague and porous, fragmentary view of the lined-up crowd scene in front of the death house of Lenin or the feverishly converging masses at the funeral of the poet Maiakowski is a means to create an atmosphere that forces us, like the frightening world of the film Europa by Lars Von Trier, to question not only the meaning of the said story, but also the essence of a report which exists as such only in its own visual representation. A similar treatment is given to the images of the toppled statue of the Tsar (a paradoxical reference to his own downfall of the Soviet iconography) or some snapshots of our civil war.

Just as the pretended durability of photography proves to be illusory when the physical medium of the same is being closely observed, and one notes that it is malleable paraffin although it appears to be marble, our memory exactly captures the frozen images of a past that we recognize as our own, and not just because we read it, but because it was written for us.

If in the olden days a ghost was haunting Europe, the same returns now, however in an opposite sense. Historical memory is not only weak, but at the same time flexible and temporary. An avalanche of images buries the sense of history, which  desperately wants to be forgotten, or, as some clear-sighted people claim, will be overcome. Faced with this ghost of ice, which is trying to turn memory into an empty accumulation of coarse images, we are left with the preservation of a nearly silent rumor about some images that are mixing in our memory. The horrors of Nazism, the cruelty of our civil war or the horrors of nuclear war are not frozen images of a dead past. Rather, they are the negatives of these other pictures that we receive from what is now Yugoslavia, the defunct Soviet Union or by the Defense Ministers of NATO.

Markus Döhne’s project is not as specific. His language, we have already mentioned, is more sober and restrained. Nevertheless, the marble is not marble (this perverse legacy of Duchamp) and no sugar piece. On the contrary. It is something so sweet and lasting as a persistent memory that wants to die somehow. The paraffin is perishable and yet we can observe on it the remains of our learned past.
Translated from German by Gisela Pauli Caldas

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