Traces of Fire
NEWS: The Lenten veil will be on display in Cologne during Lent 2025, Basilica St. Gereon (March 5 - April 18, 2025), Cologne, Germany
DIE SPUREN DES FEUERS - deutschsprachiger Text
A PICTURE OF OURE TIME
Jakob Kirchmayr's Lenten veil for St. Michael's Church, Text: Dr. Klaus Speidel
In summer of 2023, I had the opportunity to create a Lenten veil for St. Michael's Church in Vienna. I was taken with the idea, even though the required format of around 12 x 6 metres would be five times larger than my largest works.
A new format usually requires a new approach and so I decided to completely abandon the materials I was familiar with, in search of a medium that would allow me to express my feelings. Influenced by grim predictions for the future, the economic strategies of large corporations, climate change, the ongoing global destruction of nature and the horrific armed conflicts of our time, I finally chose water and fire as a transformative medium instead of pencils and paint - earth, ash, smoke and coal as a colouring medium. The traces of fire, apocalyptic and beautiful at the same time.
The Lenten cloth consists of around 20 burnt and smoked cotton cloths rubbed with ash, earth and charcoal and exposed to the rain. The individual fragments were sewn together by hand, the cloths deliberately gathered and creased - creating a work of art with an almost sculptural character.
Our world seems to be falling apart, or to have reached a turning point, and we must be careful that our society does not fall apart as a result. Many things are dark and make me sad or angry, there is so much injustice and destruction - so much hatred. This Lenten veil therefore also contains pain and anger about global grievances - but perhaps also hope because the many parts that make up the veil, which were burnt and charred by the fire, were also reassembled into a single unit - together with refugees.
Thinking about the abundance that is surrounding us and the faked happiness which the industry uses to seduce us into consumption, the location of St Michael's Church, at the beginning of Kohlmarkt, is the perfect place for a Lenten veil - a work that, although somewhat dystopian, nevertheless depicts the present.
"We would rather moribund than renouncing abundance", I recently read in an interview with Peter Sloterdijk and maybe the philosopher might be right. If you take fasting literally, it's about renounce. Perhaps we can find the key to happiness in the simplicity of things and reduction.
Jakob Kirchmayr, January 2024
