Fouling through the material, tormenting the lines, more than ever Fred Kleinberg is now making the paint spit out and the drawing burn.

The rage that he previously infused into the subjects of his works (the idols of Rock'n roll in particular, of which he made a series of spectacular portraits in 2008, or the Indian deities, insolent and angry, represented since 2002) has now entered the very body of the paintings, made in Paris over the past nine months; a powerfully thick but vigorously charcuted body, whose alternations of matt or lacquered effects evoke defacing. cuts or burns. A body sufficiently imbued with rage that by itself it induces in the viewer a powerful sensation of maelstrom. The same goes for the drawings designed in India at the beginning of last year: their nerve density and their flaming effects alone evoke impact, shock.

We are all cannibals. The easiest way to identify others with yourself is to eat them, writes Claude Lévi-Strauss. The new themes addressed, mythological or autobiographical, refer essentially to interdevoration and disaster; reinforcing the strong impressions already caused by the way in which these subjects were embodied. Here the Gods of Olympus celebrated mercilessly. There, as an angel the size of a mountain passes by, the Mouth of Truth gawed infinitely. The Sun King is black, Don Quixote rides an uprooted trunk, while Medusa chases a suicide victim. From the hands of a magician, in the guise of a dove, a roaring lion appears. A little further on, the Roman Louve looks like a sphinx. And Chronos stares at a condemned man wearing a gas mask. Here and there, a self-portrait wanders around like an incendiary night owl, unable to part with a wilted bouquet, but rowing as firmly as Charon or even wearing candles in his hat; in tribute to Tenebrist artists, who worked by the light of candles placed on their headgear.

And all this — even the butterflies — opens huge mouths, screams in the wide widths of the monumental formats adopted that the hunger of the Other is insatiable; but also that this is no reason to do without putting the table back on again. All this screams that fire, rather than seeing the disasters, it is a question of exploiting the light. As proof: these trees in flames, recently painted, framed at a low angle, and whose antlers evoke an infernal ball gown, under whose petticoats we would have been invited.

The intensity of the chosen tones is clearly nourished by the artist's long stays in India, where no celebration, no incantation, is exempt from the use of pure pigments in incandescent colors. Placed by precise and sparing touches on the foreheads of beings or objects to be protected, they are also thrown with large handles, during ceremonies, or even used by women, to purify the doorsteps of their homes by drawing mandalas.

If Kleinberg is exploring the Indian continent, if he even decided, five years ago, to build a workshop on the outskirts of Pondicherry, it is because the way in which in this vast corner of the Earth we live permanently close to the divine, he says, is deeply troubling him. Less than reading Ràmàyana (which he did, however, undertake) it is the daily, intense, intimate popular practice of dialogue with the Invisible, with great reinforcements of prayers and mixed colors, that pleases the artist. And radiates its palette.

I don't have obsessions, I go through different paths. Lined with stages also says Kleinberg. And again, that he conceives each new cycle of his work as a musician imagines one album after the other, different each time. Perpetually dissatisfied, demanding, daring, he never ceases to renew his way of translating his overwhelming relationship with the World.

He likes to quote the letter in which Vang Gogh writes to his brother: you don't know how disheartening it is to look at a blank canvas that says to the painter: you are not capable of anything; the canvas looks stupid and it fascinates some painters to such an extent that they become idiots themselves.
 Many painters are afraid of a blank canvas, but a white canvas is afraid of the real passionate painter who dares — and who has managed to overcome the fascination that you are not capable of anything.

Today, Kleinberg invests the white concern (as the poet Mallarme says otherwise) with paper or blank canvas, with unprecedented vigor, encamping bodies with muscular curves that are more tangible than ever, inspired by the recent contemplation of illustrious Baroque paintings. Which took the place of the compilation of photographs of rock stars, undertaken three years ago. New sources, new rivers, nourished by older experiences, smoldering, perceptible, in the whirlpools caused by recent adventures. Tomorrow? Oceans, seas, certainly. Very salty and very stormy, for sure. Kleinberg's work is anything but a quiet river.

Françoise Monnin, 2012
Art historian, journalist and author of monographs on contemporary artists, editor-in-chief of the magazine Artension.

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