Text: Laura Helena Wurth

If you break it down, what remains of the man-made world is its skeleton, in a sense : Iron. Every house, every bridge, every road – iron is essential to their creation. It is the substructure of everything that constitutes our modern civilisation, and it is part of what Lars Fischer extracts in his works. Just as iron is extracted from the earth, he extracts fragments of images from the digital world and incorporates them into his paintings, arguably the most modern way of combining classical painting with the digital visual world. To achieve this, Fischer zooms in very closely on an object or a place, usually using navigation programmes. He zooms in so closely that the opposite effect occurs: instead of being able to make out things more and more clearly, the pixels become so blurry that you can no longer tell whether you are looking at a crane or the skin of a dinosaur that died out thousands of years ago. The surface structure of the crane appears strangely beautiful when magnified millions of times, clicking in so close as if you were about to crawl right into the object. On these digital journeys, he often visits sites of coal or ore mining or places where these raw materials are processed. Fischer prints these images onto PVC panels, upon which he then paints with oil paint. In doing so, he also questions the very notion that a white canvas could even exist, and subverts the claim of the clean slate suggested by the white canvas, the lie. Fischer finds images for this world, in which there is an ever-widening discrepancy between what one sees and what lies behind it. The backdrop for the exhibition is a wallpaper photo on which one sees iron filings. Yet one does not really see them. For in reality, one sees a grey mass of lava, which appears to be bubbling. These are the microscopically small filings that remain when Fischer saws the steel frames for his pictures. 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 situate oneself within the fabric of the greater whole. You lose the overview. The contrast between micro and macro usually ends at the Earth’s surface. Fischer’s method goes further, as he ventures into the depths of the digital realm. Time can be read from the Earth’s layers. Over millions of years, sedimentary layers are deposited, from which one can determine their age. And not only that, one also enters the collective cultural memory when one begins to penetrate the Earth’s interior. If, for example, you are in Rome, you come across the remains of the ancient Romans, ancient temples and sculptures, the discovery of which repeatedly delays or even prevents the construction of the underground train lines. Beneath the ground in Germany lies iron ore, the extraction of which has shaped entire landscapes culturally over centuries. Fischer is thus, in a sense, also drilling deep into Germany’s past. A past that, in certain landscapes, is marked by iron ore and coal mining. But new images are needed to approach this present, which has become so fragile. Since industrialisation, the world has not changed as fundamentally as it has with the advent of digitalisation. 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, which demands that much of the old give way, and a cultural identity that has not yet fully settled into the digital realm, but has already outgrown its old symbols. In these paintings, which are hybrids of digital collage and classical oil painting, Fischer opens up a panorama of a technologised present that has almost already overtaken itself.