Pictures of holy earnestness “Life is earnest while art is light-hearted” wrote Friedrich von Schiller at the end of the prologue to “Wallenstein’s Camp”. Schiller was an early social critic and an ardent poet and dramatist, but what he actually meant by that assertion remains a matter for conjecture, since his own work does not live up to the claim. His “Song of the Bell”, the “Diver” and the “Robbers” are all highly dramatic and could hardly be described as light-hearted. But is not light-heartedness in art something of a problem anyway? If we ignore certain works by such masters as Marc Chagall and Paul Klee, when is the light-heartedness of maturity – that wonderful, softly smiling stillness in the wake of catharsis – ever achieved? Light-heartedness is a gift in art as it is in life. It is bestowed when darkness has found its place, which is mostly after a long period of toil and struggle. A painter who has no choice but to heed his inner self will inevitably encounter earnestness – holy earnestness – the deeper he digs. Fritz Hirsch’s paintings are pictures of holy earnestness. That is a rather grandiloquent statement which requires immediate qualification. There is no emotionalism in his paintings. They are not the product of intellectual fantasy or a gut reaction. The painter has no intention of indulging in any supernatural lectures or of conveying any messages of salvation. He has no choice but to paint his pictures this way. “I tried to abandon the style and wanted to paint differently”, he says, “but it didn’t work. My paintings simply turn out like this.” And that is the case even though it is from the island of Malta, where the atmosphere and mentality of the people are said to be light-hearted, that he has derived such great inspiration – from the fish markets overflowing with marine creatures of all shapes and colours, the light houses with their many windows, and the boats on the water. However, the colours of his paintings are taken from a palette mixed this side of the Alps. They are the colours of a lake surrounded by a dark forest – a lake in whose unfathomable depths darkness is already beginning to spread, while the fading colours of the setting sun still play on its calm surface and a silvery-golden crescent moon creeps slowly above the horizon. This is the impression created by the many overlapping layers of paint, the surfaces of which appear to be sealed, but are in fact cracked. They convey a sense of what lies underneath: the unfathomable lake. It is the magical moments between daytime and the world of dreams that are captured in these paintings. When he spoke of the “great dream”, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung, meant the dreams in which age-old images of humanity that he called archetypes rise to the surface from the collective unconscious. In these dreams, primeval symbols are interwoven with the landmark scenes that human beings have experienced down the ages, although how they are manifested naturally depends on the cultural background of the dreamer. In Fritz Hirsch’s paintings their manifestation is that of our Christian culture. His works also provide a highly idiosyncratic reflection of another concept introduced by C. G. Jung – that of synchronicity. So much of what is important for human development occurs at the same time, but not in the same place. In Fritz Hirsch’s works, the images combine to form a dense mass that more or less completely fills the bottom of the picture. The things that take place in chronological order when visions develop in the course of a dream are amassed here simultaneously in space only for them to grow apart again, completely at one in themselves and yet full of diversity. What is it that we see? There is the boat, the archetypal image of both the ship of life and the boat rowed across the Styx by Charon at the start of the final journey to Hades, the realm of death. The moon, too, is boat-like in shape as it waxes and wanes on its journey around the earth. We have known since time immemorial that the moon governs the water, the source of all life. In Fritz Hirsch’s paintings the moon is seldom a friendly waxing crescent; it is a moon on the wane with a dark, melancholy silver hue. But there is also the black moon, the harbinger of doom, the shadow of the bright brother that appears on the scene to herald the spread of epidemics or the danger of war. Seen in this light, it is easy to understand that the term “moody” derives from the moon. There is always an element of fear involved when people are unsure of what fate has in store for them. Fish belong in the water and are thus bound up with the moon and the boat that signals their doom. Fritz Hirsch’s fish are dead, their mouths wrenched open by suffocation. They lie on plates that are reminiscent of the completely rounded disc of the moon, the counterpart of which are the frequent cardinal’s hats that are still shaped like the gaping mouths of fish even today. Christ the fish is an iconogram we are all familiar with, but many people may not be aware of the fact that is based on ancient Gnostic knowledge, which the official church never approved of. Christ came into the world bringing with him the notion of the supremacy of love at a time when astronomers were announcing the advent of the age of Pisces calculated on the basis of a cosmic zodiac stretching far back into the past. Now, 2,000 years on, this age has expired and been replaced by that of Aquarius. But there is more aquatic life in store. Tube-shaped marine creatures wend their way across the foot of the paintings like the segments of a circle. They have openings that peer out like eyes or take the shape of horns, their darkly shimmering colours conjuring up associations with the trumpets of Jericho. It should perhaps be pointed out at this juncture that Fritz Hirsch is not only a painter, but also a musician who plays a wide range of brass instruments. But there is something else about these tubes. In some of the paintings they coil themselves up into Ouroboros, the world snake that bites its own tail, a mythical image firmly anchored in the cosmologies of many ancient cultures. In the Gnostic branches of Christianity Ouroboros is to be found in alchemy. The snake is a compelling symbol of the eternal cycle of death and resurrection within the material world. Another image of this cycle – and here we move onto dry land – is the wheel. It crops up in the most unexpected places, for instance to document the surprising transformation of a ship into a land vehicle. This ship even has a wing, but it cannot take to the air because Ouroboros has coiled himself around it in a great arc. But is it a ship at all? The bow is bent upwards, once again forming the gaping mouth of a fish, the elongated rump of which is marked by a row of dark eyes that may even be blind. Attracting attention close by is another symbolic image that appears in virtually the same guise in most of the works. It consists of three towers merged into one, on the top of each of which there is generally a cross. The figure three, which is more important in Christianity than any other, forms part of the concept of creation in alchemy. One and two, male and female, king and queen, unite to form a three, thus enabling the spiritual son, the filius philosophorum, to be born, making up the third: consciousness and self-knowledge. On some of the paintings the three towers are bent as though lashed by a terrible storm. They no longer appear to have been built by human hand, but to have emerged from primeval matter instead. Occasionally one of the three towers is lost or all three have been transformed into tube-like eyes growing out of the body of a fish. These paintings are not designed for rapid consumption. You have no choice but to immerse yourself in them time and again. There are new things to discover long after your first encounter with them. For instance, you might ask what the white houses with their empty window cavities are supposed to be. Could they be towers or perhaps Jacob’s ladders that are far too short to reach up to heaven? You will also spot plummeting boats, whose sails are once again fishes’ heads with gaping mouths, and the crescent of a moon, part of which has been knocked out to form a mouth that is poised to bite. Or does the moon not have an eye, thus making it a fish again? These are images wrapped in mystery, magical images that a painter and musician has wrested from the depths of his soul. INGRID ZIMMERMANN