THE EYE IN THE WORLD – THE WORLD IS IN THE EYE

The first rays of the sun bathed the Casamacchia in a mild orange. They began to lend colour and contour to things, to let differences emerge again – a euphoric moment, like the surfacing of clear insights from the depths. For Fritz this was the time to visit his garden. Plants, bushes and young trees had to be watered, the soil around the freshly planted vegetables loosened: daily recurring works of tending and care. It was for him also the time of wonder, of attentive and mindful perception of how life pulses in this small world and changes it daily. The course of the day took its way.

At our first morning encounter, or later over a glass of wine, he always pointed out that each of these various things and beings has its own perspective and its own particular surroundings. Thus: an infinite multiplicity of perspectives and standpoints. An important bridge to his painting had been built. “This multiplicity must be brought out, and the perspectives and standpoints constantly changed. In this way new differences are continually generated and things can speak to us differently.” For him this could ultimately happen only in the triangle I (the painter) – picture – thing. And with a mischievous smile he added: “Between me and the thing the eye inserts itself – sober, distanced, loving or fascinated – as the case may be.”

Fritz loved the Elban nature with its picturesque rock formations and stony colossi, to which wind, rain and salt have lent those fantastic shapes and figures. The transparent sea in its bluish shimmer, the rhythmic beating of the waves against rocky shores, the indescribable variety of living creatures and plants beneath the surface. The forests and the solitary tree with its gnarled trunk. The splendour of colour of the vegetation, the scent of the flowers. I will never forget how we stood with Fritz around midnight up on the rocky outcrop near the old mine. The night had long spread its dark garment over the place as over everything, and a light breeze whispered its melodies. A moonbeam, soft and pale, and in its reflection one saw the dance of the waves. And over everything the hoarse, melancholy cry of the gulls, which again and again flew out into the blackness of the night.

For Fritz these were moments “where you really begin to see, no longer with the ‘old’, distancing eye, that coolly measuring and controlling gaze that keeps things at arm’s length and turns everything into mere objects; no, you now look with your whole body, you first let the things themselves speak, you allow them, as it were, to express themselves. You let them finish speaking, without interrupting them with a hasty, conclusive judgement when they still have so much to say. The patient pausing in attentive, clear and undistracted seeing sometimes opens up, as if effortlessly, deep insights and discloses hidden relationships that withhold themselves from the impatient tugging of an all-too-aggressive intellect.”

All these impressions and filigree perceptions were for Fritz the material for his painting. Yet his pictures are no copying of the optical order, no photographic depiction of this Elban world – that was not his concern. “To paint does not mean to copy” and “I seek to ally myself with nature, not to imitate it” were two of his most important guiding principles. The innermost driving force of his painting was experimenting with forms and colours, playfully tracing the deep structures and their patterns of connection hidden behind all these perceptions and impressions, recreating them and immersing them in the light of the most varied colours. And something else distinguishes his painting: it was process and processing, a constant working on the pictures – changing them, establishing new relations between structural elements, leaving out previous ones, bringing in other colours. Sometimes he granted himself and the picture a breathing space – and that could well last a few years – in order one day to set it back on the easel and immerse himself in what had been created so far. The play with forms and colours was continued, again and again marked by surprising results of visual novelty. A new dynamic of changing structures was born.

His pictures harbour an almost infinite number of recognisable forms and colours. Whoever sets out attentively and mindfully to search will find it: what one calls fractals, configurations of self-similarity, sections of the structure that resemble the overall structure. With a piece of cardboard out of which a small square window had been cut, Fritz took me on a journey through many of his pictures and showed me these configurations of self-similarity – fractals, that is.

Almost all of his pictures are something like the provisional result of a years-long research journey through chaos. Every creation needs chaos. Chaos … nothing remains … everything changes … movement … whither? Every order needs disorder, chaos, the originally formless that can trigger a creative process. Something new arises. Yet Fritz knew deep down, even though he spoke of it only very rarely, that every form must again and again disintegrate so that something new can come into being. The spiral of passing and arising, of vanishing and surfacing, keeps turning.

Willy Bierter (physicist) · Basel, January 2003