“Perhaps, the story of a lifetime is nothing but exile.” (Saul Bellow)

Can a work of art change reality? You have to be naive or utopian to believe it. Can an artist remain insensitive to reality? You have to be a coward to think that. Of course, Fred Kleinberg's effort can be considered futile...

... Especially since, in the 21st century, it is Smartphones and other mobile cameras that track and record disasters; natural — earthquakes, floods, famines — or of human origin — wars, attacks or mass exoduses. The cliches appear on social networks almost simultaneously with the events and invade the various media screens.

But these images, by dint of repetition, lose some of their impact. Now we see them, we don't look at them. Or, rather, we only see them. However, we know that photography, despite the naivety of this idea, remains firmly linked to the fantasy of a “truthful” reality, to the principle of the cold objectivity of the automatic eye of the camera. Even if we no longer believe in this idea, it remains strong.

Kleinberg's work, through the distortions he makes in representation, places more emphasis on the choice made by the artist, on the subjective gaze that interprets reality. An artistic work that, through its interpretation and theme, injects a personal and critical surplus into the work, moves the emphasis from aesthetics to ethics. These eye-catching works are signs that have their own rules and do not stop at a simple mimetic relationship with reality. Images, isolated and enlarged, they are extracted from their media context; their trembling, almost clumsy side, the stains, the thick matter tell us that it is not a “direct” look at reality, but rather a look at the gaze. The outrage felt at the works exhibited here is not spectacular; it is slower, perhaps more profound.

Blurring the boundaries
Moreover, almost every canvas juxtaposes a “piece of life” and an artistic reference. Paradoxically, the quotations are not recent, despite the avalanche of representations of disasters in the 20th and 21st centuries. These are images that go back in time: an engraving by Doré, a Deluge by Léon-François Comerre... Everything suggests that Kleinberg seeks to telescope episodes far away in time, to play with chronology, to build a bridge between the past and the present, between reality and art. The apocalyptic images mentioned were part of a biblical or mythological tradition and are located outside of history. Their role was a timeless moral lesson and did not interfere with current events.

What is new about the artist is the tendency to blur the lines between a vision that is intended to be universal, objective and personal stories, perhaps the only ones that matter. The contrast between the “classical” paintings and his works reinforces the sense of urgency that emanates from them. In other words, with Kleinberg, alongside works that stand out for their respectful rhetoric and embedded in proven iconography, the artist's stories change in nature and take place in precariousness. His works, sometimes carried out in extreme conditions, are gestures that visually translate the shocking news of a society where violence and misery are daily occurrences. That is, exactly, a moral attitude.

So, with On March 22, 2016, Jungle, we inevitably think of The Burial at 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 brought together and pressed against each other, the presence of death — here the refugees parked in Calais pay tribute to the victims of the Brussels attack — or even because of the expressiveness 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, they are uprooted people brought together by a tragic destiny. These beings, who are forced to leave their homes and enter into an interminable spiral, are transient inhabitants of an ephemeral place. Followed by the artist who is always at the right distance, that of respectful empathy, they are worn out, washed out, erased by life. Locked in silence, as if mute, these men and women, anonymous but terribly close, between distance and intimacy, face us.

Abstract uprooting
Speechless, the numbers speak for themselves. In 2016, sixty-six and a half million people in the world had to leave their homes as a result of violence, according to the UNHCR (the UN refugee agency). The majority of them — forty million of these uprooted people are internally displaced — within their own borders — a third, twenty-two million, are refugees in other countries, among them three million have asylum status. Nearly half of the world's refugees are children. The works examined here illustrate situations where migration is not a choice but is imposed by political or economic events. Their framework is often a very vast geographical area, that of a country or even a continent.

On March 22, 2016, Jungle is one of the few paintings to feature a group, almost a crowd. Most often, the works focus on a single person, an effective way to remind us that while the figures mentioned above are frightening, they remain abstract. More than refugees, they are individuals with their own personality and a particular trajectory. Without pathos, sometimes even with a hint of derision. Derision in The Song of Amar, Mosul (2016), where we are facing a man sitting on a garden armchair, holding a pencil in his hand? A painter on the motif or a funny Mediterranean Club for someone who had to cross this azure sea risking their life? The huts in the Calais Jungle, the factories that complete this sinister urban landscape bring the viewer back to reality. Is this the same Amar that two policemen hang around unceremoniously, in a work with an idyllic title, Under the sky of Calais (2016)?

Elsewhere, the silent drama is unfolding before our eyes without any ambiguity. A teenager places his hands on a wire fence that separates him from the Promised Land. On her T-shirt is the English word Tough which can be translated by the expression “hard, hard.” At his side, Neptune, the mythological god of the sea, looks the other way.

From one canvas to another, it is the destinies of these displaced beings that Kleinberg forces us to look at. A work of exceptional size — eighteen meters — Odyssey, is like the summary of all images. Using a particular device — two mechanical rollers that rotate — the artist proposes a giant comic strip that scrolls in front of the spectator. Here, we go back in time to follow human exoduses since prehistoric times. In short, nothing new under the sky of Calais.

This text was written on July 3, 2017. On the same day, according to media reports, twelve thousand people were collected in international waters. How many others drowned?

Itzhak Goldberg 2017
Art historian, author of numerous books on contemporary art.