” By turning your eye back, (...) you see a landscape in yourself. ” Victor Hugo, The Rhine

The spectator discovers a forest, in another canvas a waterfall. These places, born from Fred Kleinberg's imagination, are as much a reminder of his travels as a desire for nature. They are mental landscapes, marked by the absence of any figure. Here, the landscape becomes a screen of the imaginary, a projection space par excellence. For Fred Kleinberg, it is that of his desire to immerse himself and disappear in the earth. A dialogue with the sensations of the landscape is then established on the canvas: The mist rising in the undergrowth, the lapping of the waves bypassing the mass of rocks, the breathing of the humus. “How to make the life of a leaf, a branch, or a trunk palpable, when it becomes as alive as a glance.” Fred Kleinberg tells us.

This reflection reminds us of Merleau-Ponty's sentence” My body is caught in the fabric of the world, just as the world is made of the very fabric of the body. [...] Space is watching us [...] so that the seeing and the visible respond to each other and we no longer know who sees and who is seen. ” Recent drawings with dry pastels and pigments on paper evoke Fred Kleinberg's transformation of becoming a plant, tree, stone. These germinations embody the alliance between humans and nature.

This interaction between the microcosm, man, and the macrocosm, the universe, is at the heart of his current work. Kleinberg, the name of the artist, precisely includes Berg, the mountain synonymous with his quest for the world, and Klein, this other dimension of the microcosm. The exhibition “REBORN GENERATION” constitutes this coexistence between body and nature”. It expresses Fred Kleinberg's desire for metamorphosis, which his return to nature promises him. Finding himself at the end of his violent path, he now aspires to reconciliation.

Death urges
Since 2011, Fred Kleinberg has abandoned the scarified collages, his tattered painting, and the shattering of bodies of his neo-expressionist period. He can no longer bear this overflow of vermillion red evoking bloodthirsty violence, the black of dark space. For him, this face-to-face encounter between the tormentor and the victim caught up in violence locks us into the logic of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth leading to murderous repetition. Fred Kleinberg has painted the sacrifices in the four corners of the world that the artist has traveled and that he testifies to. His punk-sounding painting is a cry of revolt, whose dissonances play with oppositions and contrasts. The vanities with the skulls speak of the mass graves of humanity. His figures are flesh in contortion caught between obscenity and fury, the monsters of our death urges. “Baroque flesh” evokes at once chimera, dream and reality, crossed by an electrified light. The irregularity of the forms characterizes this figurative painting which is inspired, among other things, by the 17th century, by Caravaggio but also by contemporary mythology. His existentialist painting in the Sartrian sense is embodied in the material presence of the physical act, of a rage to paint. In the thick magma of his oil painting, the contingency of human memory on our lives is expressed. The spectator looks at the scene as a witness from outside. Denunciation through provocation is a way of finding a distance for the artist, whose canvases oscillate between the knife and the target. Each thematic series is similar to a private diary, where the sometimes presence of her face underlines the autobiographical dimension of her paintings.

Man's alliance with nature
Today the artist dialogues with water, which teaches us to avoid obstacles. He paints the path of a river current, the green of genesis, the foliage, the luminosity of the air with a multiplicity of whites. This new theme is intended to be purification, initiation and transformation.

Although absent from this space filled with landscapes, the human figure is present by the viewer who finds himself inside a wild nature, composed according to the “all over” principle. The blue waterfall thus evokes cinematographic panoramas. The forest echoes landscapes already seen. These apparently realistic paintings belong to Fred Kleinberg's new landscape cycle. The artist works by theme, which he develops over two to three years and which constitutes an ideal vision of an exhibition. His pictorial universe is nourished as much by his current readings on geopolitics, significant events as well as real and imaginary travel experiences. Fred Kleinberg remembers a Buddhist water festival in Burma. Figurative painting is her means of expression, of writing her diary, she refers here as much to the tradition of Courbet as to Hokusai, as to recent films. The personal mythology of the “REBORN GENERATION” is the result of his reflection on being in the world, in the sense of a permanent transformation.

This exhibition highlights the connections between man and the dynamic principle of nature, inherent in each being. “The transformation of violence into beauty” that Fred Kleinberg tells us about, leads to wild nature, this other organic face of man's interiority. In the meaning of Cézanne:” The landscape is thought of in me and I am its conscience ”. This invocation of nature places humans in a cosmogony in correspondence with the elements and the changes of season, the cycles of the Moon and the alternation of low and high tides.

In Fred Kleinberg's drawings, the human figure is perceived as a composite body, each part of which is connected to the universe, belonging to the vegetable, mineral and animal kingdoms as well. Understood in his relationship with his natural environment, man then becomes a living interface, capable of suggesting a new alliance between nature and culture. It reconfigures our status as “master and possessor of nature” to better emphasize what constitutes us as a “co-survivor”. At a time when the natural biodiversity of environments is the fundamental concern, the flesh of the world is once again becoming a place of initiation.

The molecular state then establishes another scale: that of living matter. Transformational processes and their temporal nature defeat the precedence of the human figure, underlining the complex continuity that binds living beings in the same humus. It places it in the second dimension of Deleuze's rhizomic growth: a continuum without beginning or end, without center or periphery. This Phusis establishes another imperceptible time that is no longer that of scansion, but that of immanence.

Jeanette Zwingenberger, 2016.
Art historian, curator and author.

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