The most radical Hungarian practitioner of painterly photography presents his latest series at PINCE, as part of the Hungarian Month of Photography festival.
Ever since the 2013 works he dedicated to Simon Hantaï, contact with the papers and chemicals of photography has largely defined not only Dobokay’s apparatus but his creative attitude as well. The same quality informs this exhibition, which is centred around a paraphrase of Dóra Maurer’s work, Printing Till Exhaustion (1978–1979). Maurer’s series of drypoint etchings captures the exhaustion, wearing out, of shapes on printing plates put to repeated use, the transformation of the design; on this analogy, Dobokay presents a sequence of exposed and developed photographic papers, documenting the gradual deterioration of the developer up to the point where it no longer causes a reaction in the photosensitive paper. The “recording material” itself – the silver that is formed in the light sensitive layer of the photographic paper during development, and is then washed off by the fixer, from which it is extracted – takes shape in the gallery in the installation created from the tower-shaped glasses, the zinc plates, and the prints they produced. Just as the analytical study of the workings of photography, its most fundamental components, is intrinsic to Dobokay’s work, thinking in series is also part of his method. With a sequence of over 600 pictures, the new material, which was made for this exhibition, not only differs strikingly from his former work in its scale, but testifies to a different creative attitude that stands behind the repetitiveness, the gesture of amassing: the authenticity of representation overwrites all considerations of aesthetic selection, and demands, on this occasion, the complete demonstration of the stages of the creative process. As a result, the works materialize the immaterial component of photographic image-making, i.e. time, and also reflect on the distinctive temporal experience of the creative process, and the dilemma of irreproducible repetition.
Curator: Lili Horváth