Markus Döbeli. 3 Paintings, curated by Ory Dessau

Markus Döbeli, born 1958, lives and works in Berlin and Luzern.

The number of paintings in this presentation derives from the number of rooms that the exhibition space of Galerie Isabella Czarnowska is divided to.The organizing principle of this presentationis to display only one painting in each room. By separating the paintings between the different rooms of the gallery, the presentation reflects on a basic quality of Markus Döbeli’s painting practice – that of absolute singularity, irregularity, and irreplaceability.The painterly act of Döbeli is alienated to notions such as style or ar tistic signature. Neither a projection of an idea, nor a procedure, Döbeli’s painting undermines both the model of subjective handwriting, and the model of systematized production. A painting by Döbeli is like an event – discontinuous, unformattable, unique; it is an isolated experience of time and space. Even though it obeys the categorical imperatives of Modernist painterly abstraction – anti-illusionism, flatness, the lack of compositional hierarchy – Döbeli’s practice cannot be labelled as ‘Modernism Revisited’, ‘Reinventing Abstraction’, or ‘The Return to Painting’. It is neither critique nor homage, neither deconstruction nor nostalgia.

Döbeli’s painting is a sor t of phase transition, a performance of an indeterminate state of matter. It explores the chemical proper ties of paint as a constant shift between all states of matter.The streams of paint that flood the surface of the canvas manifest liquidity; the expansive movement of paint from and through the canvas signifies a process of evaporation, and the absorption of paint into the fabric of the canvas demonstrates congealment.The ways in which paint is distributed in Döbeli’s paintings can be described as screening, veiling, injecting, crumbling, pouring, flooding, sweeping and blowing. Each mode of distribution determines different material/textural and spatial/topographical effects.

Commonly referred to as ‘the red one’, Painting, 1999, Acr ylic on Canvas, 320 x 355 cm, the first painting in this presentation, exemplifies Döbeli’s approach to paint.The red trickles in the bottom and the upper left par t of the painting belong to the realm of liquidity, but at the same time they are like threads, and in this sense they also expose the threads that comprise the canvas fabric on which they were painted, and represent the filaments of the brush with which they were painted.Yet, while dealing with the chemical proper ty of the paint, and the material suppor t of the painting, Painting, 1999, also unravels the canvas fabric, exposing its threads not as par ts of an interlaced networks, but as single unwoven elements.

In addition, Döbeli’s painting explores the optical proper ties of paint as light and color.The chromatic radiance of his paintings is the immaterial aspect, the other side of their indeterminate state of matter. Simultaneously uniting and disuniting the optical and the chemical, each painting moves back and for th between sublimation and de-sublimation, color and material, uprooted vision and grounded physicality.
Ory Dessau