Marco Pogačnik
The Holy Landscape
Landscapes, as manifold as they are in the oeuvre of Hermann Falke, can be easily confused with the expressive from of landscape painting as it was developed in the 20th century. Luckily, there is a series of paintings on his opus, all of them painted on zinc plates, which are called “Sacrificial vessels of Demeter”. Here you see- or better feel- large, goblet-like vessels placed in front of an open landscape. Since Demeter is considered the Ancient Goddess of joy of life, fertility of the earth and consequently also the landscape, one can start to understand, where the gripping feeling that one senses when looking at Hermann Falke’s landscapes comes from: they are not a reinterpretation of natural phenomena but a deep and usually undiscovered display of the sacred dimension of the landscape. “Holy landscape” is what I call the finest of the different layers of which the multidimensionality of the landscape is composed. Amongst them is the physically-tactile landscape (biological), the vital-energetic layer (ethereal), the emotional level (the conscience of the landscape including all elementary creatures) and lastly the mental level, which the human conceives as sacred. The sacred level is often called the “landscape temple”. This expression aims at the fact that one of the expansions of the landscape is an expression of the God-like. This, however, does not mean that the landscape needs to be filled with Ancient temples, Megalithic stone formations or churches in order for it to be recognized as sacred. No. Each landscape with its places of power and power fields is a temple, if the human is able to feel the sacred quality that expands through it.
In my opinion, Hermann Falke is an artist who has, because of his artistic development, found the hidden path to the sacred layer of a landscape and is able to express it artistically through his paintings. He is even able to express the “landscape temple” of individual places without having to place secondary signs of sacredness in the landscape. Usually, the holy landscape is expressed through simple color-and-script-related elements of the paintings, which are characterized by a special fluidity, a certain power field. The metal most of these paintings are painted on certainly contributes to this effect. Zink allows for a special kind of subdued shimmer, which carries the aforementioned ethereal fluidity and thus evokes the sacred quality of the landscape and the earth in the viewer.
The Goddess with her sacrificial vessels is only being used marginally in order to make sure that the modern does not forget about the profane conscience- the holy landscape of Herman Falke’s Zink plates.
Catalogue: „Hermann Falke Slike na cinku in aluminiju / Paintings on Zink and Aluminum“, Koroški muzej Ravne na Koroškem, 2001