Formal conditions are interwoven with interpretable symbols, in mostly sombre, achromatic colour, blended and repeatedly painted over. A dark and somewhat dirty rusty red recurs and occasionally dominates. Complexes of meaning cluster together against lighter backgrounds which are often blue. Pressure and suction appear to create almost inseparable bonds: the fabric of fate, the writing on the wall, an archaeology of disasters, leftovers that herald tragedy. “The stories change with the painting”, Fritz Hirsch says. “After a while I simply paint things over again.” To him a painting never reaches a final state. He keeps thinking it over and considers completion an impossibility. Each painting is an intermediate stage in an ongoing process that can never be regarded as finished. The world created by Fritz Hirsch remains open to his intervention. Details can change and perhaps the overall structure, too, but the message itself rarely alters. This method of repeated internal association makes the original motivation irrelevant. A Noah’s ark of occidental architecture, a fools’ ship of relics, it is in no way equipped for survival. Everything is in a temporary state of finality – the debris of classical antiquity, nondescript construction blocks, wheels and church towers. The ship’s prow ends in a fool’s cap, the hull rears up briefly before finally sinking. A table with plates and a mitre stand for sacrifice. “Why do people sacrifice?” Fritz Hirsch asks. “Because they want something in return.” A jug with a swastika, a television set, a wine glass, something cage-like on the left – the bulky refuse of history. An oven, a swimming pool, fish, a mountain symbolising the earth as a whole, a wheel, and instead of an expansive interior a single settee and fish on a plate – this is definitely no still life. Crowns stand alone or face one another; there is even one on a fish’s head. A mitre has no dominant impact either. Horns resemble musical instruments, but could easily be cannons. Spires topped with crosses are reminiscent of Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Church in Barcelona. How are we to know where Fritz Hirsch’s associations come from? He is not always sure himself, otherwise he wouldn’t leave so much unsaid. A labyrinth and a billiard table are plausible. Hirsch is also a musician who plays several instruments – the trombone and other brass instruments, drums and guitar. He plays for different audiences and on all sorts of occasions. What might he be thinking, what images and fragments might stay in his mind with the prospect of changes being made to them later in substance and form? A tuba, which belongs to the bugle family, might be laden with meanings that are closer to the player himself than to his audience. Even Max Beckmann, to whom Fritz Hirsch owes a great deal, did not supply instructions for use with his paintings. Exegetes have their work cut out to find an explanation for everything. But things that can be expressed in words do not need painted images. The unsaid, that which might be entirely unspeakable, is captured in an ever-changing painting. Problems of interpretation are not the artist’s concern. Instead his process of painting is concerned with drawing out the form, with plasticity and density, with volume and open space, with area and outline. Fritz Hirsch avoids acrylic paints: “Acrylic paints don’t bend to my will.” He is lord over all that goes on in his paintings – no matter how cryptic it might appear. REINHARD MÜLLER-MEHLIS