FRED KLEINBERG
The flesh, the skin, the holes, the splinters that play wounds, the invasive carrion, the rotting body, the migratory birds with the claws of raptors, dead wind and clear eyes in crossed skulls, the colors of television in the game of horror vision, what we are, what we are, what we are becoming, suspended corpses, reddened to imperial purple, tortured alive silently, who live, love and die together, eating ourselves, eating ourselves, just to satisfy the taste of others, to chew, to spit out, resurrection, erection, Religion of crabs, omnia tempus habent, a time for everything, love and die, in apple-green solarizations and candy pink explosions, an attack on color, quickly, quickly, since you still have to live, and die, and die, and rot, and feed.
Incarnat-incarnation-incendiary
Emmanuel Dayde
Today you are painting embraces, scavengers, and vanities, which are just about every stage of the body's withering away. Should we also see in it the start of a certain withering of the paint?
Fred Kleinberg
I did not see it that way. The real danger concerns humans. It is the story of the man who makes me paint.
Emmanuel Dayde
But you're also using digital images.
Fred Kleinberg
There is no opposition. On the contrary, each technique, each tool offers its own rules and it is this diversity that feeds my work. There is a “boomerang” effect in all this, I am bouncing back. The digital image feeds the painting, which itself fertilizes the production of other images (engravings, lithos, drawings...) For example, from a video that I made at the Anatomical Wax Museum in Florence, I extracted digital images that subsequently gave rise to paintings. All of these works were presented during an exhibition “Memory in the Body” in which the passages from one technique to another testified to coherence and not to a contradiction. In all these movements, there is a pleasure in playing, in diverting constraints and in invention.
Emmanuel Dayde
However, you are painting rot. Your canvases are attacked, eaten, threatened.
Fred Kleinberg
If you are rotting, you are considering the passage of the living from one state to another, then yes — and only in this case. It is this passage that interests me and, although my images are “attacked, eaten, threatened”, they resist. My paintings are always both witnesses but also actors of a struggle they remember. In this respect, pattern and processes are closely linked. I radically locate my work in taking death into account, in order to avoid the pitfall of morbidity. Painting always falls short of contact with reality. What I am doing then seems wildly optimistic to me...
Emmanuel Dayde
The colors you use, such as purple, pink, or green, seem to counteract the violence of the subject.
Fred Kleinberg
I let myself be overwhelmed by color. I am not sure that there is a hierarchy in time, between color and subject, in the making of the painting. I don't think violence has a color or a tone. I think that this idea of absolute correspondence is a leftover from the 19th century, of what firefighter painting is. After the Second World War, when you see everything that has been done, in the existentialist current for example, everything is black, or gray. Even with artists like WOLS or GILLET. I don't feel at all in this filiation of a certain French painting.
Emmanuel Dayde
Let's not forget Delacroix, or even Hugo with whom you seem to have affinities. Wouldn't there be a romantic side to your painting, with this combination of complements, and in particular green and red — purple, something more violent, excessive?
Fred Kleinberg
Color is an impetus, a way of challenging established balance, of challenging preconceived ideas about the representation of the human experience. In the end, it's more about being rebellious to be fair. Let's say that in romanticism, I remember sensitivity and elation more than daydreaming.
Emmanuel Dayde
Despite your taste for exalted colors; can we say, as long as they are Pop tones?
Fred Kleinberg
The fact that I work with images on a computer, that I like screen printing and that I am interested in American abstract painting, makes me close to a certain electrical sensation of color. But my work is not detached.
Emmanuel Dayde
Even if you play an electric guitar, you can't say that your painting is a “Rock” painting.
Fred Kleinberg
No. I think they are two opposing worlds. I would love to paint like Sonic Youth! But when it comes to painting, we're not in the immediate future. The two-minute songs have nothing to do with the sedimentation of layers and colors that I am looking for.
Emmanuel Dayde
Superimposing layers of paper on your canvas gives an archaeological-type image...
Fred Kleinberg
What interests me is to show the passage of time. I want to represent the memory of the passage of time, the materiality of the passage of time, of these eroded parts that are almost zones of amnesia. When I create a brilliance, an impact, there is a piece of the work that makes an accident, a story. This is why I work in layers by combining uprooting with superposition, removal with accumulation. The story of the painting is made up of accidents. These rugged areas that I call impacts have the double virtue of being elements of understanding the work but also purely graphic objects.
Emmanuel Dayde
If your paintings were smooth and impact-free, they could almost be “beautiful.” But now, there are these impacts that always represent a threat, a danger.
Fred Kleinberg
The act of creating something and at the same time destroying it is perhaps that, painting.
Emmanuel Dayde
You call one of your paintings, “Incarnate” which you then create for a series of paintings in “Incarnation, Incarnation, Fire, Incendiary”...
Fred Kleinberg
“Incarnate” is the color of flesh. A light and bright red, which in this case I do not use since it is rather the blood red that is found on my canvases. I'm really painting there in a relationship with the living body. Even if he is afflicted, afflicted, defeated or tortured, it is his presence and his life that interest me. My painting is located in this periphery, an experience that can be found in body art or in Viennese actionism. Between “Incarnate” and “Incendiary”, there is “Incarnation”. Incendiary speech is a question of warmth, color and movement, but it is also a misconduct.
Emmanuel Dayde
How did scavengers get into your painting?
Fred Kleinberg
You know this word refers as much to the vulture, the animal, as to a more figurative version of the man who exploits. The scavenger is not a symbol but a fatality.
Emmanuel Dayde
As if life continued after death, through ingestion?
Fred Kleinberg
Yes. There is something very social, economic, and political about the act of eating the dead. For some peoples, I am thinking of the Parcys, it is a ritual practice in the form of an eco-system. In art, it's obviously a metaphor like a looping video, for example. We feed the monster that feeds us itself... We even want cows to become carnivores...
Emmanuel Dayde
You practice humor, as with this monkey looking at a skull. Very much in the spirit of the 18th century, which loved the paintings of learned monkeys playing painters. Not to mention the more recent “Planet of the Apes”...
Fred Kleinberg
The chart you are talking about is on the subject of vanities. It's called “Fuck Your Death.” It's a man—monkey who kisses a skull. But is it really that funny?
Emmanuel Dayde
Isn't painting cerebral?
Fred Kleinberg
No: it's physical. Even if the brain is a gut. Painters are also thoughtful people.
Emmanuel Dayde
Art historian, writer, journalist and exhibition curator.