God is no longer here – he has moved out of his house. In his place, morality has taken over. Morality has displaced God: it has slipped into a cheeky little fellow with stubble, it sits enthroned above the world, it judges complacently, it drafts the grammar of life, articulated in political, cultural, and social foundations, wrapped in a worthless cloak. A morality that no longer promises salvation, yet still claims truth. Morality has become the new sacred – it is scepter, compass, and instrument of power at once. Its companion is justice – the scales, the pendulum of fate.
Eight hands, four left, four right – they point with sharp fingers and clenched fists at human action.
Morality is flanked by two cherubs – the unliving, the never-born, the fetuses.
They too have a place – equal to the living and the dead. Uwe Jaentsch has painted a Last Judgment that does not resemble the scene of divine judgment, but rather he has created a contemporary worldview – a world in which God no longer judges, in which he has lost his authority and vacated his seat. He presents us with a world without facade, shaped by the effects of our own moral constructs and self-images.
The Last Judgment is a contemporary interpretation of humankind’s reckoning with itself. It refers to the Dies Irae, the day of divine wrath when God judges with absolute justice – the restoration of a lost order. Yet that has long since vanished; divine wrath no longer exists, it has mutated, become flesh, become earthly human wrath.
For Dante, judgment was a moment of profound moral insight. For Jaentsch, it is a mirror of the present, where morality asserts order but no longer creates it. As in Dante’s Divine Comedy, Jäntsch’s judgment is no hall, but a moral architecture. In both works runs a structure in which human behavior is reflected and finds consequence – not as damnation, but as commentary on the present.
Today morality is no longer only an inner compass – it is public, visible, socially coded. Morality has entrenched itself in our society as a status symbol, it inhabits our convictions, participates and negotiates, lets our ego grow skyward like roses climbing toward heaven. Vanity joins in, slipping in like a fog, rising from the thick chimneys of factories; together they pass judgment on good and evil. Morality is inflated, it takes everything, it pushes down values, it excludes, it is suggestive, it deliberately calls forth thoughts, emotions, and images. Morality lets us fly, high into the heavens, resting on drifting clouds. Time seems to have stopped – a state of in-between.
The dead, the living, the not-yet-born – simultaneously, equally, they are all there, all trapped. The classical linearity – birth, life, death – is suspended. Time no longer exists as an ordering factor. What remains is simultaneity. Death is not the end. Life is not the beginning. The Last Judgment is not a moment, but a condition. As in the Sistine Chapel or with Dante, past, present, and future fold into one another. The dead rise – but they were never gone. The living stand in judgment – but they are not alone. The not-yet-born take their place in the order of the world. The finitude of existence is not the final word. The painting avoids before and after; it represents the perpetual in-between, where everything moves, flickers, remains. Disciplined roses climb inward from both sides and enclose the roundabout, the turntable of life.
A swimming pool. A trimmed tree. A 24-cylinder car – the quotation of a once-promised freedom, long since regimented. No exit, no destination – only constant repetition. Whoever is caught in the roundabout is lost in disorientation. We circle endlessly, round and round. Uwe Jaentsch draws a scenario in which that vastness – that quiet grandeur – has long since left us, the one that once clung to us as self-evident, the one that let us dream. From below, the living dead gaze upward at their factories, whose smoke forms into clouds on which life floats – higher, farther. They look to their past, they look into the future, and they endure the present.
The colors of the painting are drawn from the church itself: From the ceiling fresco, the pulpit, the altar. Warm, calm, restrained – composed to remain, atmospherically embedded in the sacred architecture of the proud old church. Composed of 64 parts, 8 × 8 meters in total, assembled from 508 spruce planks, felled from the forests of Vorarlberg. Three and a half weeks of contemplation, symmetrical in communication, respectfully linked with the altar. Framed in gold – a broken, reimagined sacred citation. The Last Judgment is not an apocalypse – it is a diagnosis of our times. The business model “God” has been replaced by the business model “Morality.” It is instrumentalized – it replaces dialogue, it connects and excludes, it shames and stigmatizes, it is non-negotiable, an authority without mercy. Perhaps – perhaps the dear God is watching us – and laughing.
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