Peter Paul Wiplinger
About the world of thoughts and images of Herman Falke
Power- violence- death. Myth- history. Nature- creature- cosmos. Time- decay- evanescence. Solitude- oblivion- memory.
These are the main subjects of the thinking and the artistic work of Hermann Falke; these are the pillars on which his world of thoughts and images is built.
The majesty gloriosa, the inferno humanum and the Dies Irae are very close to each other in Falke’s image of history and humanity; they are inextricably connected with each other. Here, time has a different dimension than that of history, limited by historical facticity, than that of one epoch, than that of a society, that of a limited individual life, of the own physical and mental existence. Oblivion and memory have a different origin than the one that is known to us. Memory reaches into the future, extending from myth to a visionary pre-show. The fatal destiny of humans lies in oblivion. Death knows no memory. “Art needs remembrance” says Falke. Art needs to wrest it from death, in a fight against anonymity, in which the individual falls after death, in which history loses itself again and again. The memory of eternity has to stand against the law of mortality and evanescence time and time again, on behalf of life, on behalf of truth. This is the duty of art. This is the duty of the artist.
The color red dominates the paintings of Hermann Falke that concern themselves with these subjects. The color red, broken up by black. Red as the color of blood, as a sign, as a metaphor for life and death at the same time. Red and black are the colors of the majesties: of kings and cardinals, of judges and executioners. Red is the color of celebrations, of fame, of power. Black is the color of death, of sorrow, of violence, of destruction. In the liturgy of the Catholic Church, in this liturgy of death, both are tied to each other, merged with each other, united. Power and death have always belonged to each other and are forever tied to each other. They are the enemies of life, the enemies of humans.
In his paintings Hermann Falke undertakes an “expedition into the unknown and the forgotten” (Thomas Kemper). He returns to the origins of Western history and culture, to the myths of the Greeks, to the “House of the Atreidai”, where Atreus, the grandson of Tantalus and the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus, serves the sons of his brother Thyestes up as a meal at a “conciliatory celebration”. Power and violence, murder and manslaughter, incest and lie and the destiny of humans that is thus determined take their course from this origin; however not within the framework of two-dimensionality of history, based on the principle of causality, but rather under the determining signs of the divine and the demonic at the same time, which manifest themselves in history, in outstanding historical figures, figures that make history.
Falke returns to the Middle Ages, to the signposts of our Christian-Western culture and history, where the path up until today has been influenced and determined in a crucial way. He draws and paints important historical figures, such as Philipp II or Pope Bonifacius VIII, who’s unfortunate “Thesis of the Two Swords”, which he proclaimed on November 18, 1302 in the famous bull “Unam Sanktam”, was integrated, as part of a fundamental doctrine of the church, into the Catholic confession of faith and also determined the future relationship of clerical and secular power in Europe and the regions colonized by European Powers in the whole world. Falke feels his way to the darkest periods and the most hurtful wounds of this Christian-Western culture and history, he invades the dungeons, where those that have been surrendered, deprived of their rights, degraded, tortured and harassed wait for their judgment and their execution in the name of and in order to keep up the Divine Law. He shows this Inquisition for what it really is: not a measure within the church in order to preserve the adherence to faith but an uncontrolled and uncontrollable instrument of terror of a union of clerical and secular power in order to suppress freedom of opinion, a political, systematical instrument that radically destructs everything and everyone that stands in its way to absolute power.
The path from the destruction of single individuals to that of other people and religious groups- in 1480 the Inquisition was declared a state instrument in the fight against Judaism and Islam in Spain and later in 1542 the Inquisition was the most feared weapon of the Counter-Reformation- was not only predetermined but was followed without any form of religious or political scruples. The ideological approaches of National-Socialism concerning the fight against those that think or act differently, which found its culmination in the Holocaust, seem to get some inspiration from here. The upcoming of Fundamentalism in various religions today also means a returning to those roots.
Falke draws the offenders and the victims. The big, historical figures, over-dimensional in their appearance, bloated by the role the play in history, the pretentiousness and aloofness of their posture, in which the human becomes a figure in the theatre of the world. He draws the victims, the human that has been abused by power, humiliated, tortured, is breaking, the broken human, in his misery, in his loneliness, in his being alone, in his being left alone. He draws the representative, the superhuman- not only of society but also as a possible and continuously striven for prototype of humanity. And the excluded, the human that has been stripped of all rights and all types of protection, the naked, bleeding body, the inanimate corpse. Both, offender and victim, those that have power and those that have been abused by power, have one thing in common: the great loneliness and the silence that surrounds them in the moment of greatest power and greatest abuse, in the moment of greatest humiliation. In these moments the anonymity of power and the anonymity of death meet each other. In these moments the face of the powerful and the face of the dying become masks without and life left in them. These are the images of power and of death of Hermann Falke.
Until the “Entrance into the Gas Chamber” he accompanies the victim, the human victim, as a victim of power and violence, as someone who shares their suffering on their last journey. And his request that “Art needs remembrance” becomes an appeal without any limitations when faced with his paintings and the images of humans and of history. The human needs memory! The human needs to remember- remember until the future.
Folder: Death knows no memory, Falke-Galerie Loibach, 1989