“And I left, eternal minority, with my back suddenly bent and with a habit of smiling on my lip, I left, forever banished from the human family, bloodsucker from the poor world and bad as scabies, I left under the laughter of the satisfied majority, I left under the laughter of the satisfied majority, good people who loved to hate together, good people who loved to hate together, silly communicating in a common enemy, the stranger, I left, keeping my smile on my face, I left, keeping my smile on my face, A trembling smile, a shameful smile.”

Albert Cohen, O you, human brothers.‍

‍‍

Fred Kleinberg in the heart of darkness:‍

In the early 2000s, at the Polad-Hardouin Gallery, I discovered and appreciated Fred Kleinberg's breathtaking work. He then exhibited his canvases imbued with strength and violence with the spearheads of the Nouvelle Figuration of the 1970s and creators from Art Brut. It was then on the recommendations of the painter (and newly academician) Hervé Di Rosa, that I went to visit his studio in the Barbès district of Paris. Behind the artist, I then discovered an individual whose humanity, generosity, and unwavering commitment and arrogance touched me. I am pleased to organize at Espace Niemeyer an exhibition of his works closely linked to the historical awareness they bear witness to.

‍Exhibition itinerary

This vast presentation in the Hall of the Working Class is organized around several themes of the painter: the series Odyssey unfolds on seven large panels measuring four meters by two meters and reports on his work in the refugee camps of Lesbos and Calais.

A gigantic drawing of more than eighteen meters accompanies it, whose extraordinary dimensions lend themselves to an exhaustive reading of the career of an artist influenced by the social, aesthetic and political history of our entire era. But current events are not intended to be solely anecdotal and the painter transposes scenes taken on the spot into fragmented patterns, scattered fragments that constitute a personal recreation of real and observed events. The monumentality of the work is accompanied by the sharpness of the graphics: gray, natural to the drawing, becomes iron gray, anthracite gray, pearl gray, mouse gray, dark slate gray, gray leaded by a stormy sky and keeps its full value as the color of sadness, mourning, death. The dark wound of the charcoal line contrasts with the light nuances that pass from the softness of cream to the hurtful brilliance of almost pure white. This vast fresco, like a torn ragtime, moves us by the depth of pain it suggests.

Other large canvases that present rivers, forests, punctuate the exhibition and question us metaphorically: they plunge us into another world, that of the wonder of nature and the elements, that of serenity, of the timeless... but also recall a universe where we hide, that of disappearance and fear and also evoke the climate emergency. This presentation of landscapes softens the subject of the exhibition for a while. The beauty of nature, both violent and calm, becomes the ideal setting for lucid meditation. We feel soothed by the tall trees that tickle the sky, by the simmering water of the river, by the rhythmic pulsations of light.

In the sinuous space of Oscar Niemeyer's architecture, heroic figures from the series WeCan Be Heros reveal fighting personalities: Geronimo, Louise Michèle, Joséphine Baker, Josephine Baker, Mohamed Ali, Victor Jara, Gisèle Halimi, Joe Strummer...

These figures of commitment are echoed by the following: Red Situation : large canvases in shades of carmine, coral and madder where in his suburban apartment, a young man alone, overwhelmed, amorphous, seems a powerless witness in the face of the reality that surrounds him. He questions himself and asks us: what should we do? As if in a cage at home, it is obviously the artist in his studio in Ivry, and it is also each of us, when we are simple spectators, indifferent, without the will to act in this post-Covid world, marked by the wars at our doorstep, the repeated crises of a political, social, economic, ecological and migratory nature. Kleinberg explains:” Each work has a title that refers to red, this red which is in the West the first color mastered by man. This is probably why it has long remained the color “par excellence”, the richest from a material, social, artistic, dreamlike and symbolic point of view. With this series, I aim for a metaphysical space where the boundaries between interior and exterior are ambiguous. This staging of urbanity and isolation produces a post-modern meta-narrative that the various aspects related to our recent lockdown experience have accentuated. These canvases are also marked by the brutalist architecture of the 1970s by Renée Gailhoustet and Jean Renaudie that I see from my studio in Ivry, in particular these futuristic constructions with their famous star buildings and their planted terraces.” These paintings in scarlet tones irresistibly evoke the Spleen By Baudelaire for whom red” This color so dark, so thick ” Form a couple with black:” ideal red (...) big night ”;” Dark night, red aurora ”;” vast and black nothingness (...) sun drowned in its blood ”.

‍The Leo Man: Romance and Commitment

During my first visit to Fred Kleinberg, I stopped in front of a large painting placed high up in the living room: a self-portrait where the painter in a boat, in the middle of the sea, oars in hand, is accompanied by a big skink lion. The paradox of this unusual intimacy between a modern Noé, Nouveau Saint Jérôme and the king of the jungle made me want to deepen the artist's work. This man alone at sea with a carnivorous animal, this promiscuity between humanity and savagery upset me. Faced with this astonishing work, through its iconography as well as its craftsmanship, the name of Delacroix immediately came to mind. How can we not think of these felines, lions, tigers, panthers that the master was going to paint in the Jardin des Plantes with his friend Géricault? How not to think of his famous Dante's boat where the Florentine poet accompanied by Virgil sails on the Styx to visit the Underworld in a fragile and fluctuating boat. It is this same astonishing imagination, these same feverish and tumultuous movements of the composition, the moving colors, the brushstrokes visible as if so many punches, this fiery material of painting, that make the link between Fred Kleinberg and his illustrious predecessors. The aesthetic approach is similar, the result just as remarkable. A 21st century romantic, he does not hesitate to repeat the battle cry launched in his day by Delacroix when in The Chios Massacres, he denounced the barbarity of the Turks of the Ottoman Empire in the face of the Greek people's desire for independence and freedom. Kleinberg also decided to turn his brush into a gun to denounce the injustices and horrors of the world.

The art historian Federico Zeri liked to say that there are proven elements of political and social criticism, a dissenting view of the system in which painters work, on the rulers, the sponsors, the major decision-makers and this in Western art, even since the Renaissance, when for example in An ascent to calvary, A Flemish Primitive dresses Roman soldiers in the uniform of the Spanish occupier! Kleinberg is masterfully part of the vast line of committed artists by giving substance to the ever-renewed drama of those who no longer have anything.

 The Damned of the Sea:

 The seven major diptychs of the series Odyssey confront us with the reality of the migration camps from the island of Lesbos in the Mediterranean Sea to the Jungle from Calais where the artist left to experience the daily life of these outcasts of a new genre and to show it to us. He drew these large paintings, testimonies in which he put into images a young man behind a wire fence in Lesbos, the dismantling of the Calais camp by the CRS, the ceremony in tribute to the attack in Brussels on 22 March 2016..., in the face of mythological visions or visions drawn from the history and history of art. In the exhibition, each work is accompanied by a sound system that can be listened to via a QR code at download on his phone.When I ask the artist how this series came about Odyssey he explains:” In 2015, like many, I was overwhelmed by the terrible photo of Alan Kurdi, this three-year-old Syrian boy found drowned on a beach in Bodrum. With his parents, he was fleeing Turkey to take refuge in Greece when their boat capsized. At the same time, off the Libyan coast, a trawler carrying nearly 800 people sank with only 28 survivors... and these tragedies continue until today. I had the feeling that our memories and our consciences were saturated, cauterized, in short, became insensitive to these stories and visions, that death at the borders of Europe had been, since the 1990s, a recurring, almost daily phenomenon. I asked myself how my medium, painting, could help raise awareness of these tragic events. Outraged by the inability of European states to coordinate a response other than repression, I contacted the NGO Médecins du Monde and with the support of the Agnès b. Endowment Fund. , starting in 2016, I made several trips: to France, to the Jungle of Calais and to Grande-Synthe, to the refugee camps of Karatepe and, to Moria, to the island of Lesbos in Greece. My life as an artist was compared to the humanitarian world. On site, I saw the work of NGOs that come to the aid of boats in distress: Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children and others more recent such as MOAS, Sea-Eye, Sea-Watch, Proactiva Open Arms or SOSMédranée... I shared everyone's daily life and I wanted to act in this global solidarity movement based on the active cooperation of citizens to help exiled people. In the camps, I led creative workshops, listened, recorded. I took photographs, drew, conducted interviews with migrants, volunteers, and those responsible for humanitarian actions to constitute “material” both for my paintings and for the soundtrack work that accompanies the works created by my friend the musician François-Régis Matuszenski. I learned and tried to understand. ”

In a huge charcoal drawing, the artist proposes a real epic on the theme of the movements of prehistoric men until today. This vast composition could serve as an illustration for the theories of modern anthropologists, geographers and demographers and in particular those of Hervé Le Bras when he specifies in The Age of Migrations :” Paleontologists believe that Homo sapiens owes its survival and then its success to its ability to migrate, which allowed it to respond to the glaciations and heatwaves of the last hundred thousand years. (...) Of the 185 remaining species of primates, only man has migratory behavior. Homo sapiens is none other than a remarkable Homo migrant. ”

If we refer to the mythology of migration, we must remember that it was addressed from the beginning to the man who seeks knowledge. The first migration would go back to Adam and Eve. Driven by curiosity (the snake), they enter the forbidden zone of Paradise where the tree was located...” which was good to eat, pleasant to the eyes and desirable for accessing knowledge... ”...” Eve ate some of her fruit and gave it to her husband... their eyes were opened... and they knew good and bad ” which earned them expulsion, the exile from Paradise. The Bible says verbatim that” After driving the man and the woman out of Paradise, Jehova put, in the East of the Garden of Eden, cherubim with flaming wings that guarded all sides to prevent access from the path of the tree of life. ” This forbidden image of Jehovah and this pattern of punishment but also of obstinacy in accessing a framework favorable to true knowledge, are repeated in the stories of the myths of Babel and Oedipus.

In the myth of the Tower of Babel, the migratory impulse is expressed in the desire to reach heaven in order to reach the knowledge of another world, distinct from the known one. But this desire is punished by the confusion of languages and the destruction of the ability to communicate.

With Oedipus, several migrations follow one another: the first took him away from his real parents to avoid the fatal accomplishment of the oracle; a second led him to voluntarily flee his parents (whom he does not know were adoptive) to head for Thebes, his city of birth; the third, it was exile after parricide and incest. These myths all provide statements that help to understand the difficulties faced by individuals who have abandoned their homeland. In all mythical migrations, we find the search for knowledge, the desire to find a new and different world, but any migration, all research already involves the risk of a failure of the project.

The anthropologist Michel Augier, in his book The fight for mobilities published in 2019 states:” From the point of view of the social sciences, the term “migrant” initially means nothing other than “person migrating”, without connotations, neither positive nor negative. ” Then, little by little, the researcher notes that this term has acquired a pejorative meaning because “migrants” have difficulty completing their migration when they are not welcomed and integrated. Michel Agier adds:” These migrating people are then interrupted or diverted in their movement; their wandering makes them precarious and they are finally stigmatized. Talking about migrants is no longer neutral, and it is practically necessary to explain it in the face of the public controversies that the term now carries. ” Whatever the family, political, educational, climatic motivations..., being a migrant in the 21st century is not without raising a particular psychological problem affecting the person who emigrates as well as those around him and his environment and relating as much to the motivations of migration as to its consequences. However, between the reflections of thinkers and the lives of people, it seems necessary to make a major distinction by recalling the etymology of the word “migrant”, as does the Hellenist Andréa Marcolongo who says in essence that the word has an indefinite meaning of change but it is a change that is not at all desired, with its very specific burden of loss, abandonment and pain. Today, Kleinberg is talking about human dramas that in a way make women, men and children invisible. As I write this text, this terrible news comes out:” On June 14, the tragic shipwreck of an outdated trawler carrying hundreds of migrants off the coast of Greece, more than 78 deaths... Only 104 people have been rescued to date, including 47 Syrians, 12 Pakistanis and 2 Palestinians, according to a count by the Greek authorities....”

It is true that the Mediterranean is a transit and circulation route, a” space-movement ”, as Fernand Braudel defined it, but since the 2010s it has also been a daily graveyard. Camille Schmoll, a geographer specializing in migration, underlines:” So-called “irregular” migrations are increasing sharply in this maritime space. Crossing, on dubious and precarious boats, has become a source of profit as well as a political issue. However, border deaths are not inevitable but accompany the vast repressive movement that has characterized migration policies in recent decades. These policies multiply the obstacles, however, without succeeding in discouraging men and women from taking the ever more dangerous migration routes. Thus, we are witnessing the strengthening of the means implemented to fight against so-called “irregular” immigration: cooperation agreement with third countries in order to facilitate the return of migrants and to outsource the upstream control of flows; creation by the European Union, in 2004, of the Frontex agency, created in 2004, by the European Union, in 2004, of the Frontex agency, reformed in 2016. In recent years, these policies have also taken a maritime turn with, for example, the criminalization of sea rescues operated by NGOs and the establishment of a “search and rescue zone” off the coast of Libya. The consequences in terms of deaths and human rights violations are terrible. ” His colleague Nicolas Lamberta drew up a map of the deaths of migrants at the borders of Europe which makes it possible to account for the massacre: since 1993, there have been more than 50,000 deaths in the Mediterranean. This sad geography shows that the Central Mediterranean route (Sicily Channel) is the most perilous in absolute terms, accounting for more than 20,000 deaths between 2014 and 2022 and at the same time that the number of deaths in the Channel continues to increase.

Not a day goes by without abstract statistical figures contradicting the pretty name “mare nostrum”. The images that illustrate them speak of illegal immigrants, foreigners, anonymous people and deprive these refugees of their humanity. This is what Fred Kleinberg wants to give them back through his works through this short story. Odyssey as perilous as that of Ulysse. The artist has been living in the midst of people who are sometimes victims of the elements, too often victims of other men. His testimony is based on his anger and his receptivity. His paintings echo cries of revolt, fury, rage, rage, rage, sadness, sadness, overwhelm, death and are also there to encourage us to action, to fight against the apathy or violence produced by this” Contemporary and cosmic drama of humanity ” to quote his own words.Whatever motivated his commitment, he can legitimately proclaim and say after Rimbaud in the Illuminations That with his own eyes he witnessed scenes where” Finally, when you are hungry and thirsty, there is someone who chases you.”

The diptych Charybdes and Scylla, evokes the Strait of Sicily, which has had a sad reputation since ancient times, and which continues to “swallow” ships and shipwrecked people. In Greek mythology, Charybdis is a marine whirlpool that is traditionally located in the Strait of Messina. In Canto XII of The Odyssey, Homer explains that it is a female monster, the daughter of Poseidon and Gaia, that absorbs water from the sea and rejects it three times a day. Also dangerous, Scylla, the daughter of Phorcys and Hecate, is on the opposite bank. The Aedes has six heads, each of which has a triple row of teeth, and twelve feet! It feeds on fish but also devours sailors when a ship comes too close, like the six companions of Ulysse whom it drags to death. In French, the expression” Fall of Charybdis into Scylla ” means to go from bad to worse. Its English translation is just as brutal, when pictorially, it evokes the culinary world:” To Fall Out from the Frying Pan Into the Fire ” (fall from the frying pan into the fire). It is in this continuity and these merciless consequences that Davide Enia's novel is located. The Law of the Sea published in 2017. In it, he recounts the experience of a father and his son watching the drama that takes place in the vastness of the Mediterranean, in Lampedusa, this veritable “border island” where the discomfort of homeless stateless persons parked in camps, victims of multiple tragedies and shipwrecks, takes shape. At one point in the text a fisherman explains:”Do you know which fish came back? Wolffish. (...) And do you know why wolves repopulate the sea? Do you know what they eat? You got me...”

On the one hand, Kleinberg's painting shows Ulysses in the middle of a fight with a sea monster, a strange dragon that wants to hug him in order to better suffocate him. The maelstrom of the green and foaming sea responds to the terrible serpentine whirlwind of the clash between” The man with a thousand tricks ” and Scylla. The part that mirrors this conflict denounces another, as if we were going from Scylla to Charybdis: in a rich city like Paris, the painter shows an unusual camp with families, women, children, patients... This vision is a reminder: a first camp appeared in 2015 on the Quai d'Austerlitz, then other small camps were set up along the Saint-Martin Canal... This vision is a reminder: a first camp appeared in 2015 on the Quai d'Austerlitz, then other small camps were set up along the Saint-Martin canal.. The one depicted in the canvas was under the skytrain at Stalingrad station, not very far from the painter's studio. It housed more than 3800 people and was dismantled in November 2016 to be rebuilt at the Porte de la Chapelle and dismantled in turn. Now excluded from Paris, the camps are mainly found in the first ring of the city, in Aubervilliers or Saint-Denis.

The work also evokes the violent evacuation of 3,000 people from the camp at Place de la Porte-de-Paris in Saint Denis in November 2020. Followed by the police for several days, the refugees were forbidden to sit or stop: they finally found refuge in Place de la République before being evicted again. Today, camps for unaccompanied minors are being organized, such as the one in Ivry-sur-Seine, which welcomes 450 young people at the end of 2022. Following the symbolic occupation of the Place du Palais Royal in Paris at the beginning of December 2022, we will find a temporary solution for them.

In resonance with these tragic visions, to accord with all this barbarity, the artist never tires of multiplying scratches, scratches, large scars in his impasto of material that seem to contribute to the drama of the situations. It is above all the image of a fight that this diptych highlights, the fight of human beings against destiny, against inequality, against the elements. From these moving panels, there is a” Sight power ” to quote Brecht, who did not hesitate to say:” The disorder of the world, that is the subject of art. ”

Instead of repeated questions: “who are they, what do they want, where are they going?” ”, Kleinberg encourages us to take into account the demand for his “human brothers ” ready for anything for” Pass, pass no matter what the cost. It's better to die than not to pass. Pass not to die in this cursed territory and in its civil war. To have fled, to have lost everything.” And with him, let us grieve when we note that:” Where you fled the walled walls of bombed cellars, you found a closed border and barbed wire... ” These are the lyrics taken from the movie. Ghosts haunt Europe by the Greek writer Niki Giannari commented on by the philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman. So many artists like Fred Kleinberg admire the courage and tenacity of these people who persevere.” with a desire that nothing can defeat, neither exile, nor confinement, nor death.”

Another picture, Lesbos, brings together two strong and charged images. On the one hand, in shades of blue, the revival of Deluge, the firefighter masterpiece from 1872 by Léon-François Commère preserved at the Nantes Museum and on the other a cluster of polychrome life jackets. The first panel, the monumental vision of Deluge with these clusters of naked flesh, is reminiscent of the composition of Raft of the Medusa by Géricault. As always, Kleinberg draws from his classical sources rules for a living, expressive and singular art. Proof of his eclectic style of inspiration, he has the gift of using elements from styles and distant eras to bring his ideas to life in his paintings. The original implementation of ancient elements leads to a completely renewed vision of the themes. This variation on The Flood allows a piece of ardor and bravery through the audacity of the movement, the solidity of the composition, the luminosity of the colors. The pyramidal plan of the composition and the energy of the triangle construction highlight the plastic distribution of figures and animals stuck together, a pathetic mass of mixed bodies that are as in a Graeco-Roman sarcophagus bas relief. As is often the case, the painter seems to be a sculptor diverted from his destiny!

The use of variations from blue to white, the stridence and the chilling virulence of this colorful contrast give the impression that the protagonists are frozen, that the cataclysm is happening on the ice floe. In addition to the reminder of divine damnation, it is the awareness of climate change that seems to be added here. The color is impasted in thick layers because Kleinberg likes to paint firm and greasy, the brush stroke is always tasty.

In the counterpart to this diptych, the bodies have disappeared and only remain stranded on the shore, between the dunes, heaps of life jackets, tires, wooden logs... everything that could allow man to float, to survive. Here again, an impression of compact geometric mass is required, but at the triangle of Deluge Responds to a circle that evokes a buoy that unfortunately was useless. The malleable side of this shape is like inflatable vests that have become soft, flexible, plastic and soft. While some are blue, it is mainly the orange colors, signs of distress, that explode on the surface of the painting. What is also striking is this multitude of black, gaping holes, to let arms, heads, bodies pass through and which seem to have a hole in the canvas. If the surface is completely filled, it is still emptiness and absence that hover.

The line is stylized and casual, as if inspired by comic books. In the same explicitly contemporary way, like Philip Guston, Kleinberg seems to want to renounce the seductive means of painting in favor of a violent, deliberately simplistic style that could be called rude. To be credible, no more “beautiful” paintings! To be able to tell stories, “bad” paint”! To involve violence, irony, politics, politics, the grotesque, a painting close to caricature. In a kind of classical reminder, to unify the work, the backgrounds of the two panels respond in arabesques that draw icy waves on one side and sun-drenched dunes on the other, both surmounted by the same impassive shape of clouds.

 Europa features two monumental characters: the representation of a white marble sculpture of the god of the sea, recognizable by his long beard and trident, and that of an African, his face and hands stuck to a wire fence. Poseidon, his head facing the blue sky as if to hear no call for help, empty eyes, remains impassive and turns away from the young man. The coldness of the sculpted marble corresponds to the contemptuous disdain of the master of the oceans. Opposite, he is a “young person”, well of our time, with a T-shirt with the word “” written on it. Tough ” for” Tough Guy” or hard-boiled. Like a fish trapped in a fisherman's net, he is locked in the shiny fishnet prison into which his expedition led him. A new colored Ulysse, he is looking for an answer to his situation as a hunted animal. In Homeric legend, Poseidon is the enemy of Odysseus, who dared to defy him by blinding his son, Cyclops Polyphemus, and by pretending to be called” Nobody ”. Nobody, that could be the name of that poor kid reduced to the number.” 2016 ” written on his shirt. Standing behind these terrible barbed wire, his eyes wide open in the void, he constantly scans the Ionian Sea.

Kleinberg explains:” For this series, I chose a form of duotone, with shades of tones for the paintings evoking the history of art, mythology, our collective culture. They are presented in dialogue with other paintings inspired by current images, those treated in polychromy. ” The whole series Odyssey seems plunged into a big blue bath... The blue of the sea and of death! This color opens up to a host of interpretations: to be scared to death, to see only blue... In German” To be blue ” means to be drunk! It is not the infinite blue of azure, the eternal and spiritual blue of Yves Klein; nor that of the title of a DeMiro painting:” Blue is the color of our dreams ”... This cold color - just the opposite of red - is traditionally the symbolic expression of majesty, divinity, tenderness... With Kleinberg, blue is similar to that of Jacques Monory: an icy blue that sets us aside, a “blue screen” that allows us to apprehend reality with detachment, the blue of the nightmare which means that everything is going wrong, while its virginal aspect pretends that everything is going wrong. bathe in the blue! This heady blue is the blue of melancholy and the disappearance of shipwrecked people.

A watchman in the fight against the reception crisis

 Fred Kleinberg's humanist commitment transcended his inspiration when in 2016 he went to “the Jungle” in Calais. There, more than 10,000 people packed into this vast slum set up on an unhealthy lot a few kilometers from the entrance to the Channel Tunnel.

The song of Amar, Mosul, uses a fantastic engraving by Gustave Doré, the frontispiece of the illustrated edition of the Bible which presents a catastrophic vision of the story of Noah's Ark. Kleinberg remains very faithful to the original work with arms that come out of the water to ask for help, a couple who hoist their children on a rock beaten by the waves that foaming and creamy waves smash. A majestic tigress dominates the scene and is also trying, desperately, to save her offspring, one of her babies in the mouth to avoid being carried away by the violent rolls of the raging blades. The drama is rendered by the use, on an almost black Havana background, of brown and sepia tones that highlight the whiteness of the flesh and foam. The boiling of the indifferent, living and joyful sea unites bodies to better engulf them. On the other hand, this apocalyptic chaos marked by bistre, tarry tones that vary from yellow to dark brown is complemented by a landscape at the end of the world. In the right foreground, the shape of a rock, some weeds growing here and there and behind a camp of tents on the Riviera; on the horizon, the towers of a city, the greyish roofs of houses. In the middle, a lonely man gazes at us with his tormented gaze. He is sitting on a camping chair made of striped fabric like prison bars and hugs his cell phone with his left hand. We are here in what the media have gloomily called “the Jungle” of Calais.

The union of the two panels is achieved in a stylistic and intellectual way by the reuse of the bistre color of the central character's clothes in harmony with that of the fawn as well as by the feelings implied by their gestures: the man wants to give and take news of those he loves; the animal wants to save his young. Everyone with the same tenderness and the same hope tries to get out of this hellish and perilous situation.

When we listen to the soundtrack that completes the picture, - an interview with the central character conducted by the artist and re-orchestrated by François-Régis Matuszenski -, we learn that Amar, that is his first name, comes from Mosul, that he had won in Iraq a singing competition comparable to The Voice. But with the arrival of the Islamic State, he had to flee his country and leave his family behind. He improvises in French in his beautiful voice with Arabic intonations.” Habibi, I love life...” When he learned a few days later that his partner, his lover, had been imprisoned and killed by ISIS, he would end his life before even trying to reach England. He continues to sing in our memories:” I love life... but not like that. ”

The works follow one another and the drama continues with the same propensity for outrage. Under the sky of Calais We are witnessing the dismantling of the camp by the CRS under the gaze of Andrieu d'Andres, one of the famous characters in Bourgeois of Calais by Rodin. With his head in his hands, he masterfully represents hopelessness. In another canvas, it is the fire that decimates the camp: the volutes of red and orange flames mixed with the pale clouds of suffocating smoke cause intense suffocation for the central character of the painting as well as for the spectators.

 On March 26, 2016 shows the solidarity of these refugees with the victims of the sinister attacks committed in Brussels. As the art historian Itzhak Goldberg recalls:” We inevitably think of The Burial in Ornans, this monumental painting by Courbet, which transforms a banal subject into a history painting thanks to the size of the work, the large number of human figures gathered and pressed against each other, the presence of death (...) or even because of the inexpressive aspect of the characters. However, there is an essential point that separates these two scenes. In Ornans, a Jura village, the birthplace of Courbet, the peasants, firmly camped in a mountainous setting, are at home. In Calais, the uprooted are reunited by a tragic destiny. These beings, who are forced to leave their homes and enter into an interminable spiral, are temporary inhabitants of an ephemeral place..” All communities, all religions are present and if the protagonists seem anonymous it is so that we can identify even better with them in this disastrous ceremony. Using simple sleeping bags and colored blankets, they created a makeshift Belgian flag. But as in a macabre scene, these fabrics undulate as if they were covering dead bodies.

To all these humans made anonymous, FredKleinberg gives back presence and dignity. By making them the subjects of his paintings, he restores their lost humanity to them, making them visible to the world. His artistic approach allows him to free himself from media voyeurism. A first approach to reality is made in a direct way like that of a reporter: documentation, photos, sound recordings, video shoots... The artist, like a witness, reacts hot. In a second stage, he takes time to reflect in the workshop. That's how he starts to get into what's called the story, the one that doesn't happen every day but starts with thoughtful comments. He then touched on the tradition of great painting, history painting. His works, linked to the historical and cultural context in which they were made, through their intersections and juxtapositions, tell us what is happening. Thanks to his creative process and his medium, the artist touches on universal time. The pictorial material spread in large quantities on the canvas is triturated and its colored paste is proposed as an equivalent of suffering flesh. The agitated textures catch the light differently and in their irregular sedimentations, the layers of paint reveal chaotic outcrops where all the borders blur. All this Maniera reflects the artist's primitive and impulsive impulse, which he then masters through his controlled gestures.

Fred Kleinberg is a true Baroque painter: his work addresses sensitivity, direct perception, fantasy, feeling, intuition, sensuality as well as imagination. He is leaning more towards Pan than Apollo, more towards the forest than towards the Sun, or as Gérard Garouste would say” More on the Indian side than on the Classic side ”! Marked by freedom, independence, originality, uniqueness, he frees himself from any constraint, any rule and does not fear confusion, chaos, turmoil, the mixture of materials, forms, the fusion of the sacred and the profane, the fusion of the sacred and the profane, the marriage of the tragic and the comic, the exaltation of a certain panache which for him is simply life. His painting is made up of contrasts, antitheses, hyperboles where the grotesque meets the sublime, the real the unreal, the ugliness the beauty. It is a theatrical world where everything seems colossal, extraordinary, in a particular universe where the explosions of passions are manifested through movement, rapid gestures, stretched and contracted muscles... As in a twirling ballet, a Sabbath dance, the painter hurries his characters onto the canvas, the painter hurls his characters onto the canvas, builds them with obliquors, diagonals, inflates their clothes from the breath of storms, raises the waves for an invitation to travel, to escape out of time and space. A new Prospero, a wonderful prestigiator of form, an alchemist of matter and color, Kleinberg knows the secrets of transmutations... and even in suffering, he gives us access to the marvelous.

Leaving the artist's studio, I think in particular of my recently deceased master and friend, the painter Hervé Télémaque, a predestined name when talking about the story of Ulysse. In his work, he too often used camping tents that became metaphysical, symbolic objects, to signify exile, precariousness, the fragility of being and existence and to give a roof to his painting. In Kleinberg's work, the tents lose a bit of their poetry but remain a moving testimony and a cry of alarm that materialize instability, uncertainty, and distress. Overwhelmed by uprooting, immigration, the poverty of those who have little shelter to face the reality of history, but also nourished by hope, Fred Kleinberg acts as a watchman to stigmatize the dramas of our time. His painting offers fireworks in the face of the most pathetic dramas, provides an aesthetic emotion similar to an unforgettable opera aria but also remains a real combat act.

‍Renaud Faroux

Art historian, curator of the Fred Kleinberg exhibition at Espace Niemeyer.