Icons

The series begun in 2011, Icons, requires a more detailed (ex-)planation, since even its title is not to be understood unambiguously. What, then, is meant by an icon?

In modern usage this word is employed in an inflationary manner and appears wherever an omni-representative figure is spoken of, a symbol that embodies a particular matter according to the principle of pars pro toto. Yet this profanisation stands in irreconcilable opposition to the religious meaning of the icon, which depicts the word of God. And it is precisely the root image that does great justice to the Greek origin εἰκών (eikṓn), meaning image, effigy. The icon in the religious sense, however, is not only the symbiosis of divine word and image, but likewise the very likeness of the object. Therefore the English term a likeness is already misleading again, although this translation is also listed in Henry G. Liddell’s Greek–English Lexicon of 1883. In the strict sense, a likeness implies that the underlying object is represented on an abstract level, whereas the image in the sense of image = object represents the same itself. What is at stake here is therefore a narrow ridge between unadulterated reproduction and a certain degree of abstraction.

These subtle lines of thought and models of distinction and explanation already occupied the Church Fathers, as a result of which disputes over images and prohibitions arose, although fundamentally it was only a matter of proclaiming the Christian Truth. Nevertheless, East and West Churches remain divided over this form of representation to this day, and it must be emphasised that icons are not to be equated with devotional images (as omnipresent in the Roman Catholic Church): whereas devotional images retell and interpret religious scenes — that is, depict them — icons directly embody what they show.

My works within this demanding autopoietic system belong neither to the one nor to the other complex: they are neither to be understood as a profanisation or de-religionisation of Christian symbolism, nor do they presume to approach the supernatural sphere of a consecrated icon. They adopt certain attributes of classical Byzantine icon painting, almost always taking existing and traditional hagiographies as their basis, and then collide brutally with modern forms of representation which, through the overextension of abstraction, are entirely removed from their religious origin. This procedure, however, in no way serves the pseudo-critical “consideration” undertaken by modern artists and “scholars”, according to which Christian concepts of thought and interpretations of the world — the supposed explainability of everything — are denounced as fairy-tale nonsense and their adherents as oligophrenic idiots. Rather, these representations are to be seen as products of a millennia-long tradition in a new light; it already suffices to let this light fall upon the images from another direction in order to evoke a shift of perspective.

On the one hand, the narratives are based on documented martyrdoms; on the other, I also invent entirely new image types with their own attributes, as the self-portraits demonstrate. Here it is not my aim to portray myself as a saint; rather, I tell little stories which, however, in this form cannot be attributed to any already existing saint. Furthermore, in the years 2022 and 2023 I subjected my Icons once again to a large-scale and meticulous reworking, whereby the earlier versions were not completely erased, so that remnants can still be discerned on the surface. This vibration between old and new is intended to make clear the conceptual condition of icons in the here and now, since the paintings too, after a decade of existence, tell their own stories, which in a certain sense could again be described as self-referential. Moreover, through the procedure of palimpsesting I refer metatextually to the reuse of medieval manuscripts, in which the writing surface was scraped and washed in order to be written on anew, while the layer of script beneath was not entirely erased, but could re-emerge from the depths.