ROSSINIČRE.- Marc Jancou Contemporary is presenting Markus Döbeli: Paintings and Watercolours, the Swiss painter’s first solo presentation with the gallery. The exhibition, which runs until the 29th of August, brings together a selection of the artist’s larger works on canvas and a number of smaller watercolour works on paper.

Spanning a period of about ten years the works on show reveal the artist’s single-minded approach to painting. Introspective and meditative, making their presence felt but at the same time appearing rather elusive, Döbeli’s paintings are characterised by relatively translucent areas of colour which blend into one another seamlessly, with no sharp or definite outlines giving the impression they have occurred rather than having been produced, applied even.

Döbeli’s works present an uncompromising take on abstraction that allows little room for speculation on any possible links to representation. The last bastion is perhaps the category of landscape. The prevalence of light and the soft edge formations might indeed invite a likening to clouds, water, a sort of seascape perhaps. And yet, as Dieter Schwarz has pointed out, suggestions such as these that liken Döbeli’s shapeless shapes to clouds, these formless, ethereal and transcendental “things” only negate any links to representation and re-affirm the abstraction that is at the heart of the artist’s practice.

Born in Lucerne in 1958 where he now lives and works, Markus Döbeli is an abstract painter whose practice is characterized by a singularity of vision which dates back to his student years during the 1980’s, first at the School for Art and Design in Lucerne, Switzerland and then at the State Art Academy, Düsseldorf from which he graduated in 1987. Working primarily on very large canvases which flirt with the expanse of the wall, Döbeli's works are constructed from multiple semi-transparent layers. These fields of colour have no contours or borders and even when they can be seen to give rise to forms these emerge suddenly and almost instantly disappear again giving his works an elusive but nevertheless arresting character.

The exhibition is accompanied by a limited edition catalogue published by Marc Jancou Contemporary with texts by Dieter Schwarz and Bice Curiger.