FRED KLEINBERG
As we have seen, Fred Kleinberg, with malice and skill, likes to muddy the waters. Reading his works should never be taken at first glance. With the series “Baroque Flesh”, right from its title, the painter brings allegory into play in his subject and wins the bet with the ace of metaphor.
So, in complete complicity, we decided to address these questions during an in situ interview: in his Parisian gallery, at Dominique Polad Hardouin. The gallery owner, an art historian by training, having previously demonstrated the interest that should be shown in “Monster You”, building on this success, is presenting again in its walls, in spring 2011, a new solo show by the painter. The exhibition this time features Mythologies and Autobiography; and, above all, questions the history of painting.
The conversation is a bit like a confession... We understand each other, we respond in a whisper... In concert, accomplices and side by side, facing the work... We advance slowly through the long gallery, under a mild sky, that of a skylight. We stop in front of each room, for the pleasure of emotion and analysis. We haunt the basement space like a crypt open only to the faithful...
What do these large canvases, these blood-chilling oils actually tell us? What do these mixed media works, these pastels on paper tell us like so many palimpsests? “Often there is nothing on top, everything is under it. Search” said Paracelsus, but what does Fred Kleinberg answer?
Patrick Lefur
You gave this series an enigmatic and quite provocative title. What do these two words hide if not antagonistic but whose association at least may appear to be very paradoxical?
Fred Kleinberg
The English word “flesh” means meat, something very raw. That is to say as here, when it comes to painting, I want to talk about the flesh in its violent aspect. And indeed the title is very paradoxical since it is also a mix of languages and genres. Let me explain, the word “Baroque”, at the beginning, refers to a style of jewelry. “Barocco” in Italian, irregularity, pearl... To the flesh, soft and brownish of the blood that irrigates it, is therefore associated with the concretion of mother-of-pearl, hard and white... The concrete of mother-of-pearl, hard and white is therefore associated... Baroque is created by the mixture of forms and ideas... Baroque is created by the mixture of forms and ideas. It is an amalgam, a charged and complex universe, full of multiple meanings.
Patrick Lefur
Indeed, by definition, Baroque is what shocks, annoys or surprises. But this term, which therefore evokes strangeness or the incomprehensible, also refers to an artistic and literary style. By choosing such a title, this series questions the incarnated body but also the history of interpreted art?
Fred Kleinberg
In the previous series “Monstre-toi”, I asked the question of the heroism of the authentic individual through the faces of certain icons of rock and punk music, and the answer had to be read, in the universality of the free man who denies nothing of what is... I now wanted to compose with new sounds, go in a new direction. This has been working for me for a long time: I had to engage in a real dialogue with painting with a capital P, with classical art; in fact everything fits together, everything is only a continuation... The body in contact with reality, man facing his destiny, left to his destiny, left to his inexorable solitude, to his inexorable solitude, to his monstrous but human cruelty, and History, both that of geopolitical facts and that of Culture, of Art. Arts...
Patrick Lefur
This work is a testimony and you also wanted to pay tribute, didn't you? But weren't you afraid that some would also see it as a recovery rather than a reinterpretation and even, in the rhetoric of the subject, a “sledge effect”?
Fred Kleinberg
It is, of course, a tribute, a return to the roots, but neither a recovery nor a reinterpretation. An allegation only, a deference in reference... In “Baroque Flesh” you have to understand the assertion of my taste for a certain type of painting, classical in this case. The statement of a painter of today who cites his sources but writes something else. Cranach, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Goya, Rubens, or Juan de Valdés Leal...
Patrick Lefur
As proof, your canvas “The squaring of the circle “: that's clearly a tip of the hat if I may say so, to the grandmasters...
Fred Kleinberg
This piece embodies, in a still life precisely, the life of painters of past centuries. A tribute to their difficult working conditions. This modern hat, on which candles rest, is reminiscent of the one that artists wore to paint as close as possible to their canvas. We can also see a vanity It is a subject in its own right but the important thing is that it is in charge of the presence of the person who carried it. So, once again, through this exploration of ancient art, I can affirm a question about a way of painting or drawing.
Patrick Lefur
A lot of themes and patterns intertwine in the “Baroque Flesh” series, how did you manage to make a coherent whole?
Fred Kleinberg
In this mixture of Baroque, there are therefore references; in fact imprecations or, as I was just telling you, quotations. It's about autobiography and mythology or, more exactly, mythologies. Those of Greco-Latin civilization but also elements related to Indian culture. Polytheisms that also have certain points in common and thus respond to each other across centuries, continents, civilizations. All of this nourished the show and gave it its unity. I also reread Homer's Odyssey, Petronius's Satyricon and I divided myself between my two workshops: in Paris I made the large oils on canvas, in Pondicherry the drawings, for example the pastel on paper “Bacchanales” for example, the pastel on paper “Bacchanals”... The series therefore presents a polytheism rhyme in imagery but only the “Flesh Baroque” logo is of the order of the mystical. Although not “religious” I think that painting is also a spiritual act. So I play on patterns that mix the irrational and the material: here the ancient or Indian deities, there the gorgonians and the jellyfish, the vanities too, but in proximity to the objects and situations of modern life.
Patrick Lefur
If, as always, you place Man at the center of your work, in this series it is also a man, you, who, pictorially speaking, resurfaces?
Fred Kleinberg
Yes, it's true I had abandoned the question of the self-portrait several years ago. I'll come back to it here, but in a transfigured autobiography...
You have to understand that I am also the guinea pig for my pictorial experience. Let's take the canvas “The Roaring Fortieth”, yes, I am at the helm of a frail skiff but will I arrive safely? And is there even one? I am only interested in this autobiographical aspect in that it allows me to go beyond my own story. This canvas roars precisely because it shows the link that our race maintains with animality, savagery, the inhuman aspect of man...
Patrick Lefur
Overall, the Baroque in question, updated in this series, borrowing from this movement the taste for contrast and duality, is a strangeness that is strongly expressed. Violently! And, while your palette is stronger than ever, there are also other important technical aspects that I would like you to focus on a bit...
Fred Kleinberg
Yes, even more than before, I use a palette with opulent, bright, even strident tones. Vermilion red prevails but there is also a whole range of shades of browns and blues. And black and white, in oils and obviously especially in pastels, make it possible to show several levels of reality. Yes, it's a violent paint, raw like meat. This series is boiling and tense: there is a lot of anger on my part, a lot of tension... A lot of plastic work too. Duality is everything: two techniques coexist. On the one hand, worked with a knife, the material is thick, very thick, the oil imposes its fat and, at the same time, and, on the other hand, treated with a brush, on the same space, for each piece, for each piece, many things are very fine in the line. The painting tells of colorful scenes, the drawings of other stories that are just as disturbing but more diffuse. Another technical bias, very important, to this serrated thickness in matt I applied/opposed a smooth and shiny glaze, that of classical paint. The pictorial climax is that in places the saturation of the glaze wrinkles the surface of the painting. To summarize things, with “Baroque Flesh” I affirmed my choices about how to talk about painting and how to do it... So I worked on the canvas hung on the wall, so standing, but also when it is flat, on the ground, squatting on the ground as if to better honor it. Brush work or hill work, body work with your finger... The body and the mind “put into action” if you can say...
Patrick Lefur
With these themes, these scenes, these colors do you want to deliberately disturb the eye, destabilize the viewer?
Fred Kleinberg
Yes, absolutely! And here again, the Baroque and the flesh have a double effect on who looks at the canvas but also on who created it. My motives speak as well as the titles of the pieces. In a mixture of genres, classical “recipes” and modern “effects”, contemporary ideas, in an upheaval of the space of nature. Nature of a burnt forest or a rough sea, the human and inhuman nature of a banquet scene teeming with food. In this regard, I highlight a recurrence: the question of cannibalism, devoration and inter-devoration, which was already at the center of the series “Obscenity and Fury”. Here we reach total disgust in “The Feast of the Heart”... We reach the ultimate carnage “At the other end of the world”... Between mythological and modern representations, dishes here next to a computer, flowers and flames, flowers and flames, flowers and flames, human beings and flames, human beings and animals, animals, vanities, everything is said and shown: “Vertigo”, “Vitriol” and so many other “Scream” cries...
Patrick Lefur
But in this maelstrom you can sometimes find a way out, right?
Fred Kleinberg
In this work, which is ultimately nourished by “melancholy”, in the sense in which Dürer speaks of it, is only a question about creation and therefore an eternal back and forth between creation and destruction, I also slipped in a few pieces of hope. For example, “Lux III”, for balance, is a march towards light and, at the same time, a metaphor, that of the problem of chiaroscuro by Rembrandt. This work is largely allegorical. He is talking about death and rebirth, basically, another title makes it clear: “Phoenix”...
Patrick Lefur
What more can we say when it seems that we have succeeded in talking about destruction and renewal by painting its various states? Isn't painting ultimately trying to do the “Great Work”, and thus being an alchemist?
Fred Kleinberg
There is no “success” there are only attempts. And one result, the work. My moral duty, if I may use such an expression, is to show evocative things. But of course I wanted to offer different levels of reading and that does not exclude the imagination of those who look at my work. And at the end of the day, I'm not trying to say anything in particular. I think it's better to approach the overflowing pot of the crucible rather than trying to see the or a message. “Nigredo” will be my last word...
Patrick Lefur
Art critic and journalist, author of monographs on contemporary artists.