Rüdiger Hasse
Á nous les Fraises –

Á nous les fraises – We know that the little man injured himself when he fell off the ladder during strawberry picking. It is uncertain whether this was due to clumsiness or whether he could not master the weight of the fruits. In Döhne’s work, however, it is not ready, nor even decided whether such an undertaking can ever hope for a favorable outcome. The will to succeed is there all right, as much as the impatience of the title attests, an impatience that is lusting for life in its rawness, therefore fittingly translatable as: „Bring on the strawberries.“
 
But here art has to offer a lot more than just demanding the satisfaction of an unfulfilled longing for something that it would anyway not be able to bring about as mere art. Of course, we are attracted first of all to the experience of that which is concealed by the image fixed in the wax block. Here, the recess in the photo image, and the elaborate damage by the smooth cut, is no secrecy for the eyes, which speculate on the dubious pleasure of frustration. What is missing is simply too obvious for the eye and would be too banal to inspire as a mere image. So it must mean – forced through concealment, something beyond the picture without limit for imagination. Since the beginning art has been the real and collective venue at which – in countless variations – assemble the needs and curiosities of life.
 
In this sense art wants to go to the full here: It wants to bring about a hypertrophy of meaning that could result – as if being a punishment for the sacrilege of excessive desire – easily in complete uncertainty and speechlessness. The cryptic imagery of the scene itself is not all for Döhne. With its subtle intelligence the metaphor of the mere scene is impeded by the construction as a sculpture. By exposing the resemblance to places, it takes nothing back from the excess, but with this imitation it also succeeds to bring about a crucial formal difference: the sculpture is in itself a completed work, not a fragment as a detail, like the pure picture would admit to itself. The aesthetic strategy is called incorporation. The wax block incorporates the image within itself and grants it the transition into space as a material – enabling it thereby to take form in a different way.
 
Jean Paul has drawn attention to the following mechanism: „We are full of heavenly dreams, which saturate us – and when the joy or the expectation of dreamy solace is too large, then we have something better to be than being saturated – that is, to wake up.“ Döhne‘s sober design contains exactly this proportion in the matter itself. Of course, it needs to be read. Then the imitative incorporation of the image by the sculpture redeems the targeted delirium from the intangibility and distance, which is threatening the collapse of meaning into the abyss – not really, but seemingly, and yet in the same way as a dream becomes true upon waking.
Translated from German by Gisela Pauli Caldas