Felix Dolah

Nothing to be done

2017

Felix Dolah (b.1988) is a self-taught artist who lives and works in Mainz, central Germany. Felix Dolah's drawings are monochrome: mixed on paper, water and charcoal giving birth to a series of portraits of individuals, alone or grouped, whose gender is sometimes difficult to define. Those long limbs loosed like spider-threads, form the originality of these people with deformed features and expressionless faces. The characters seem to emerge from a world in pain where social cohesion reigns supreme. Rehabilitating the importance of the social entity, Felix Dolah raises the communication as unique means of survival. At the heart of his work, there is a humanity that is disintegrating, in a desperate quest for identity. The landscape is nonexistent: only the human counts. The ghostly shadows that populate the universe of Felix Dolah look timeless: they are the part of ourselves that rambles in an in-between, the part which was transformed, camouflaged, destroyed. It is probably for this reason that Felix Dolah leaves fingerprints on some of his drawings, giving the work an organic, carnal dimension. In this way he recomposes an identity which diluted with water, tends to fade. Who are these disembodied bodies? The last upheavals of a world frozen in its inhumanity.