AUF NACH PATAGONIA Painting

www.nikolaus-hirschmann.de When Hirschmann paints he dreams his inside out. He loses himself thoughtlessly in someone that he is … takes a white canvas … or, as he often does, one of his painted pictures … and paints over the yesterday in favour of a woven now … lives and puts picture over picture … feeling over feeling … moment over moment … as if there was no truth, as if a painting could be more than a picture. As if it were like in real life. As if you could prove your belonging, your being alive by painting and perhaps give your existence what seems like a higher meaning … as if you could justify something original by painting it, by celebrating it. In what category can you put Hirschmann‘s art? If you look at it from the art-historical point of view: obsessive dilettantism. The attempt to become something / someone. But another category would fit, too: universal, crossing borders / transcending. On the one hand appreciating and admiring, on the other hand exposing. In his view of things he unites the both and the as well as, the yes and no. The duck-billed platypus that is taken out of its natural environment reflects perhaps, with its mostly undemanding natural naivety, our own egocentric, small world conditioning, but it also fills and decorates pleasantly the empty wall above our sofa, satisfies our need for filling space and passing time. Hirschmann. A jester at the court of the arts. On the one hand loud and colourful, on the other hand meditative and sparing. On the one hand paying court, on the other hand subversive. Everything is somehow and anyway holy and anyway and somehow profane. Everything is art anyway: knowing / being able / bearing witness. And not-art. Whose cow is holy and whose cow should be slaughtered? In response to that, Hirschmann paints a provisional picture on another provisional picture. In Hirschmann‘s picture worlds borders become blurred, opposites appear as non-identical twins: venerable and despicable, familiar and questionable, professional and amateurish. Hirschmann‘s paintings appear like the sketchbook of an ancient screenplay, performed on the stage of the world, like screenshots in the opera glasses of a quiet, neutral spectator. Hirschmann paints his “silent watcher” and all the other pictures in a cave. Thus, perhaps, he escapes the virus of mind control / market control / external control. That cave is in the cellar of his house.