Characters in Fred Kleinberg's painting devour each other. Literally, when does a corpse (?) Open turns into a morbid meal for a man (?) who rips off pieces and brings them to his mouth. The integrity of the body is constantly threatened, the envelopes are torn, the pictorial paste is transformed into a mass that stops and fascinates. But human flesh never simply becomes the flesh of the paint. In fact, this tearing of the skin, this literal exposure of the body, has nothing in common with the ancient skinned ones, where the flesh is revealed intact in its transparency. Rather, it is magma, an indifferentiation of the body's components which, in trying to escape itself, seems to regress below form. Desire gives way to horror, the canvas thus becomes a field of experimentation where events of the sensitive and no longer only of the visible order occur. Elsewhere, cannibalism remains metaphorical: it is Russian women, shrouded and shapeless, who sell the only thing they still own, their clothes. More than a flea market, it is a market for the first (or last) necessities, a vision that has haunted the artist since his stay in Moscow. Human decline is reflected here in the need to leave the second skin that is clothing in order to survive. These holed and torn collages, where the anonymous figures are based on the posters plastered on the walls of the Russian capital, illustrate an urban landscape “eaten away” inexorably by a disastrous and violent economic climate. Itzhak Goldberg, 2002.

Itzhak Goldberg ‍

An art historian, he has published numerous books on contemporary art.