The Curator of the Paris Bar Museum, whom I have been following for a few years, cannot mention this painter who is so committed as the brilliant Fred Kleinberg, without going back to the immense Emile Zola.

Because everyone knows, since the predominant role of the writer during the Dreyfus affair, how intrinsic the role of intellectuals, and in particular creators, is to the democratic survival of our planet. It was only with Emile Zola and naturalism, especially Germinal, that creators worried about the social situation around them. Then, Dreyfus will bring writers, caricaturists, painters and musicians to look at the misery of the world. With J'Accuse, the author is no longer content to watch and monitor, he provokes and gives rise to debate. Without departing from his artistic genius.

Our marvelous Fred Kleinberg is the contemporary archetype of the committed artist: he lives and paints migrants, whom he so skilfully combines with the horrors of The Odyssey.

The painter calls on our collective memory, our references, our symbols, our mythology (Mythology), which nourished us, educated us and whom we use every day to bring us to awareness.

This consciousness is fomented on the basis of orange life jackets, grills, and children in cages. There are also those tributes paid by these useless people to the victims of the attacks in Brussels, these unexpected gestures that only an explicit Belgian flag is needed.

Fred Kleinberg is undoubtedly not alone: the Greek artist Maria Giannakaki, the famous Bansky (who devoted three works to the Calais jungle), the Michel Tournier in La Goutte d'Or, have in turn devoted themselves to migrants. But Fred Kleinberg pursues works that are much more astonishing, more or less legible to the lay viewer, playing with the thickness of oil paint as well as with often imposing formats, which give the public the illusion of entering the frame. And Fred Kleinberg takes us into this frame, grabs us by the brush and offers us to board the raft, to grasp what myths and legends can bear witness in favor of migrants.

Our artist experienced this suffering by going to the Middle East, to Lesbos, to Calais, everywhere where the relentless and frightening destiny projected these human beings, these minors, these parents and these old men, who left everything to join us.

We are indebted to them and that is what Fred Kleinberg reminds us of. His diptychs appeal to our education as well as to our senses, our cultural “baggage” in the same way as our emotions.

Fred Kleinberg fixes on his canvases what changes and disappears, departure, flight, exile, hope, migration and death. He does not evoke guilt or compassion: his painting is sumptuous and infinitely more subtle. It encompasses us, invites us to share these adventures in the form of nightmarish journeys. We leave our homes behind, pile up our meager treasures, furtively greet those who remain, and then set off to face the Mediterranean. The sea awaits the migrants, maiming them, sorting them and killing them, before handing over the survivors to the most solitary police. Europe and the West are also the sign of uncompromising authority, of administration without humanism, of fates delivered at the will of demagogues. So, Fred Kleinberg's painting offers us salvation.

Homer still speaks to us today through Fred Kleinberg. And it's happy, for all of them, tossed around on Mare Nostrum, as well as for us.

Fred Kleinberg is well known in the artistic world for the paintings he has been creating over the years and which represent the most modern form of figuration. However, Fred Kleinberg is also the insatiable portraitist of our dark places, those that every amateur and citizen sometimes dreads to stare at.

The images that Fred Kleinberg captures through painting are thrown out of time, extracted from their history, even from their universe, to which, paradoxically, they are intimately attached. It transforms them into a unique mission, a timeless art. It must be said that Fred Kleinberg takes possession of icons of Judeo-Christian culture from time to time, whom he hijacks with a sensitivity and an eye that is always stimulating.

The migrant suddenly sets Fred's objective. He is sure to take off his clothes, turn his back halfway or defy the focal length. But it is rare that he ignores us, as Fred Kleinberg attracts him so much to make him better known to us, in an encounter surrounded by a light that is so singular and so familiar at the same time.

Let's summarize: the most famous scenes of the poet from The Odyssey are redrawn by Fred Kleinberg, who involves our brothers... The plot is striking and the circle is complete.

This is obviously a well-thought-out work — in every sense of the word — on the history of art, of reference, of quotation, of homage and of stimuli.

Fred Kleinberg, his subjects fascinate him; and at the same time lead him to interact with and disturb the status of these epics, which have become symbols thanks to recordings, sounds that are audible and pleasant, although very foreign.

These images shape our contemporary history, just as they continue to shape our daily lives. Fred Kleinberg's aim undoubtedly consists in re-establishing the symbolic nature of these evocations, by metamorphosing what made them their strength, their impact and therefore their reputation.

Because the world of the most famous symbols and paintings is in the end sometimes hermetic. And Fred Kleinberg's approach carries this apparently contradictory and prodigious ambition to make them intelligible.

What exactly is a man on a boat, a castaway from elsewhere? If these images occupy such a place in our daily lives — sometimes, without us suspecting it — it is because they are essential to the construction of our identity; both our identity as human beings gifted with thought and confronted with existential anxiety, but also our collective identity, of belonging to a group or a society, to humanity. Without them, cultures, political regimes, and lives would be devoid of much of their substance.

So here we are, trying to remember these legendary episodes, to reconstruct them mentally in order to focus on the works of Fred Kleinberg. They are re-revealed again to our amazed and immodest gazes.

However, Fred Kleinberg knows how to keep the beings he takes control of at a fair distance, in order to keep these untouchables in the fascinating parallel world that he shapes image after image, diptych after diptych.

This is how, for him, every pain becomes a work of art again, and we witness, powerless but with delight, this metamorphosis that is the grace of a great artist.

Emmanuel Pierrat, 2017.
Lawyer and writer, Curator of the Paris Bar Museum.

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