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The Church of Positivity is an ongoing body of work by Nicolas Maxim Endlicher that explores the symbolic relationship between pandemics, nationalism, religion, illness, and systems of socialexclusion through painting, installation, garments, and found materials. Drawing from Catholiciconography, military insignia, public-health graphics, Austrian and German historic visual culture,and geometric abstraction, the works repeatedly collapse the formal language of the cross, intothe “plus” sign, and institutional emblems into unstable symbols charged with questions of purity,contamination, martyrdom, masculinity, survival and dignity.Across the series, signs historically associated with state power, medicine, Christianity, and warare stripped of fixed meaning and reassembled into fragmented devotional objects haunted by HIV/AIDS, collective fear/pain, and political memory. Emerging from Endlicher’s experience living HIV-positive and from his upbringing within postwarAustrian Jewish history as the descendant of Holocaust survivors, the project examines how so-cieties construct moral hierarchies around illness and belonging. The works move between since-rity and confrontation, combining references to modernist painting, wartime propaganda, religious imagery, queer aesthetics, and vernacular street materials. Rather than presenting identity as stable or resolved, The Church of Positivity stages a continuous symbolic struggle over visibility, stigma, dignity, and the reclamation of images historically used to discipline marginalized bodies.
I began The Church of Positivity during the first COVID lockdowns while thinking about the emo-tional experience of living through a pandemic. What interested me was not only illness itself, but the psychological structures that emerge around it: fear, secrecy, paranoia, morality, social dis-tancing, ideas of contamination and purity. For many people, isolation arrived suddenly in 2020. But for HIV-positive people, especially those who lived through earlier decades of the AIDS crisis,isolation has often existed as a much slower and more invisible condition — social as much as medical. I had lived for years with a positive diagnosis while remaining largely silent about it, to the point where even I no longer understood why I was hiding it. The work developed through an obsession with symbols and with the ways institutions communi-cate power visually. Until obsession iteself became subject of the work. As well as ideas of infinity. I became interested in how the cross functions simultaneously as Christian symbol, military in- signia, medical emblem, nationalist graphic, and positive diagnosis marker. In many of the pain- tings and objects, these systems collapse into one another: the “+” sign becomes devotional and threatening at the same time; nationalist symbols begin to resemble medical warnings; geometric abstraction starts to behave like coded language or ritual architecture. I often work with found materials, discarded clothing, wood, old furniture, cheap fabrics, and damaged surfaces because I want the works to feel unstable and socially contaminated rather than monumental or purified.
My visual influences come from very different places simultaneously: Catholic imagery, Austrian and German modernism, wartime propaganda graphics, queer aesthetics, street iconography, public-health campaigns, Egon Schiele, Viennese Secession painting, military uniforms, DIY club flyers, memorial culture and Pop Art. I am less interested in originality than in symbolic mutation — how images migrate between systems of religion, medicine, nationalism, and subculture while retaining emotional residue from all of them. The project is also deeply shaped by my family history. I come from an Austrian Jewish family; my grandmother survived Auschwitz after fighting as an undercover agent for the communist party against Nazi occupation in Paris during her forced emigration from anexed Austria.Growing up in Austria and Germany as both queer and Jewish meant growing up with an acuteawareness of how identity becomes politicized, disciplined, and made visible through symbols.In The Church of Positivity, I try to reclaim some of those visual systems — not to purify them, butto destabilize them. The works are not utopian. They exist somewhere between confrontation, mourning, irony, devotion, and survival.