„Ferrohaze - a small extract of a planetary world“

Just as iron is extracted from the earth, he extracts image fragments from the digital world and incorporates them into his paintings. It is arguably the most modern way to combine classical painting with the digital visual world. To do this, Fischer zooms in very close on an object or a location, usually using navigation programs. He zooms in so close that the opposite effect occurs: instead of being able to see things more and more clearly, the pixels blur, and at some point you can no longer tell whether you’re looking at a crane or the skin of a dinosaur that went extinct thousands of years ago. The surface structure of the crane reveals a strangely beautiful grain when magnified millions of times, as one clicks in so close as if one were about to crawl right into the object. On these digital journeys, he often visits coal or ore mining sites or places where these raw materials are processed. Fischer has these images printed on PVC panels, on which he then paints with oil paints.

In doing so, he also questions the very idea that a white canvas could even exist, and exposes as a lie the claim of a clean slate that the white canvas suggests. Fischer finds images for this world, in which there is an ever-widening discrepancy between what one sees and what lies behind it.

A photo wallpaper featuring iron filings serves as the backdrop for the exhibition. Yet one does not actually see them. For what one actually sees is a gray mass of lava that appears to be bubbling. These are the microscopically small filings left over when Fischer saws the steel frames for his paintings.

Yet the proximity to the object suggested by the zoom function of the digital map does not yield a better understanding. On the contrary, it distorts the view, and one can no longer determine where one actually stands within the structure of the bigger picture. One loses the big picture. The contrast between micro and macro usually ends at the Earth’s surface. Fischer’s method goes further. He delves into the depths of the digital realm.

Time can be read from the Earth’s layers. Over millions of years, sedimentary layers have been deposited, allowing one to determine their age. And not only that, one also enters the collective cultural memory when one begins to penetrate the Earth’s interior. If you are in Rome, for example, you come across remnants of the ancient Romans, ancient temples and sculptures, the discovery of which repeatedly delays or even prevents the construction of the subway. In Germany, iron ore lies dormant underground, the extraction of which has shaped entire landscapes culturally over centuries. So, in a sense, Fischer is also drilling deep into Germany’s past—a past marked in certain landscapes by iron ore and coal mining.

Yet new images are needed to approach this present, which has become so fragile. Since industrialization, the world has not changed as fundamentally as it has with the advent of digitalization. Yet neither process is entirely complete, nor has the other fully taken off. Both processes converge in Fischer’s images, thus depicting the threshold at which society finds itself in the year 2026. Somewhere between a relentless drive for progress—for which much of the old must give way—and a cultural identity that has not yet fully settled into the digital realm, yet has already outgrown its old symbols.

In these paintings—hybrids of digital collage and classical oil painting—Fischer opens up a panorama of a technologized present that has almost already outpaced itself.

Text: Laura Helena Wurth