The details in the work of Ernst Fuchs are so refined and worth taking a closer look at. Therefore I decided to start with them.

Clicking on the images will bring you to the complete image.

I had to take a deep breath, before I dared writing something about Ernst Fuchs. This is a real impressive artist. In his early days he already learned to master the delicate skills of the medieval Flemish painters. Special the visionary work of Jeroen Bosch should be named here.
Developing himself trough Mannerism and Art-nouveau, he finally felt home at Fantastic Realism, which suites him like a glove indeed. 
The goose-flesh it gives me, when I notice how he mixes the past with contemporary times. The first impression often takes us back to the mid-ages, but always there is this detail showing the paintings are 20th century proof. 
Printing this one big accusation in my heart; 'haven’t we human beings learned nothing so far! Are we - in spite of all the beauty we are also capable of – doomed to remain aggressive beasts? 
Sowing such a lot of dissension and destruction, because, just as our gods, we seem to be lost in the haunted woods of madness.'


For example, when we take a look at the painting we will go into now: the strife of the re-creating Gods. We see illustrated such wealth of archetypal dream material. However dream? Night-merriest would also be appropriate.

In a lot of the paintings which caught my attention the Pluto/Persephone myth is central and also Fuchs got inspired by it. However in my understanding the holy matrimony between the opposites of life and dead is given here a homo-erotic under-tone.

The transfixed body of the martyr ST. Sebastian breaths the ecstatic atmosphere of an sacrificial rite. Stronger, it is an ode to the holy phallus.
Ecstasy and horror lay very close together and Fuchs expresses himself in such a masterly way. Interweaving innocence and terror, even stronger, reverse them.

In the Greek myth it is the lovely maiden Persephone, who got overwhelmed by a horny Pluto who not only raped her, but forced his bride to live at his side in the darkness of the underworld. This can be seen as the archetypal abdominal world of our suppressed complexes. Which mostly are of a religious and sexual nature. 
With a great flair for dramatically effects Fuchs turned the table by

not presenting to us the lovely spring goddess, but expose her dark face, that of the archetypal witch. Who rules over the source of life and dead. This time it is the mail adolescence who is presented as a sacrificial lamb. This leads us way back before the Greek Myths. Straight to the matriarchal period in our civilization, when men played a subjective role in the cycles of dead and re-birth.

During this period the Goddess symbolized the imperishable principle. She was the one bringing new life to the earth, while in those days men didn’t had the faintest idea yet, there input was of equally importance.

The fickleness and transistory of time related issues were symbolized by men and that was made clear at a sacrificial rite at the end of the harvest period. At the end of a week with overwhelming and ecstatic celebrations the husband/ son of the goddess, or her earthly representative, was sacrificed. Afterwoods his body was teared in pieces by a group of frantic women. So his remains could get berried in all directions of the wind. That way he was given back to mother earth. This would make sure the next to come harvest would become rich again.
During the winter period the sacrificed man was mourned deeply, but soon as the new spring would arrive,