Each image in Fred Kleinberg's work may hide another. Or rather, each image is another powerful image. Using different techniques and various supports (video, photography, painting), the artist closely follows their journeys, their metamorphoses, and their recycling.

Love stories, but also stories of endless betrayals, because it is the gaps and the bridges between these different representations that fascinate the artist and that form a production rich in ramifications. Sometimes, one would even be tempted to believe that for Fred Kleinberg the essential function of the image is to be diverted from its initial role or to become an image in the second degree. Manipulative, without being iconoclastic, he retouches and tinkers, modifies and adds, in short he invents.

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Thus, he films the famous anatomical wax museum located in Florence. The camera glides over its transparent replicas of the bodies, penetrates them, combining eroticism and macabre. Here, the scopic drive, which is hidden behind the alleged innocence of the artistic gaze, is laid bare. Distancing or undermining it also, because the spectator's gaze is relayed by that of museum visitors, who are in turn busy recording the same show on film.
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From time to time, a body or fragment, wax or living, is fixed on the screen. However, this freeze on the image is nothing like a still image. Fred Kleinberg extracts it from its context, prints it on glossy paper, in fact the matrix of a series of variations painted on papers of the same format. Each of the components of these mini-series shares the same chromatic tone and, despite an often abstract appearance, suggests the structure of the initial image. A line of force, a curve, an interlacing brushed with vigor, recall a detail photographed, transformed and covered by pictorial material. The flesh rises to the surface, the memory of the body is maintained by the logic of the series. As we know, memory is like the cement of the series, because as Jean-Louis Schefer writes: “Each surface, each painting is inhabited by memory, that is to say by the time of movement and the successive touching of several times of the painting”.

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It is likely that this need to use the same elements, to rework them constantly, comes from Fred Kleinberg's desire to find a way specific to him to occupy the surface of the painting, to achieve an animation that does not require any narration. His recent works suggest that he is engaged in a long process of fighting against existing images. This is how red canvases are covered with black spots and clouds or dark blue backgrounds are crossed by pink shapes, like imaginary but probable maps of a storm that is still breaking out. Covered, or rather crossed out, they seem to be charged with violence, where creation is intimately mixed with destruction.

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However, despite the refusal of any spatial illusion, despite the rejection of any reference to any reality, the sensation of an implicit space, the appearance of filigree figures persists. Irregular paths form inextricable networks, floating meshes, expanding volumes. These organic knots, often at the center of the picture, sometimes give rise to forms that are both threatening and seductive at the same time, halfway between the fetus and an unfinished body.

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Faced with this particular abstraction, a final series: faces that have always accompanied the artist. Anonymous, scribbled “portraits”, faces that emerge from a magma of bubbling features. It is likely that Fred Kleinberg crossed these famous lines by Henri Michaux: “Draw without particular intention, doodle mechanically, faces almost always appear on paper. Leading an excessive facial life, one is also in a perpetual facial fever. As soon as I pick up a pencil, a brush, it comes to me on paper, one after the other, ten, fifteen, twenty. And mostly wild. Are these all my faces? Are they others? What funds came from? Wouldn't it just be the conscience of my own thinking head? ”

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Perhaps, as this poet says, what we are looking for, is what we always come back to, sometimes in spite of ourselves, is the face. Perhaps “Memory in the body” is above all the memory of the body of the self, the one that you can never escape.

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Itzahk Goldberg, 2000.
Itzhak Goldberg is an art historian and collaborates with the art magazine Beaux-Arts Magazine. He has published numerous books on contemporary art.

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