‍(...) We can be heroes, just for one day...

We can be heroes for ever and ever (...)

David Bowie - Brian Eno

When I met Fred Kleinberg, we first talked about this impressive work he had done on migration, in a world that now has more than one hundred and thirty million displaced people, with their processions of exiles, victims, camps, camps, these “cemeteries”, at the bottom of the Mediterranean, at the bottom of the Mediterranean and, however, a maintained hope, a will to live of beings that Fred Kleinberg chooses to paint.

Very quickly, and I don't know exactly how, we talked about them as heroes. It was, no doubt, an intuitive, literary, pictorial response to a “What to do? ” haunting, more relevant than ever.

Having only our imagination as strength, these were feelings of revolt, discomfort and loneliness in the face of these geopolitical situations, far beyond our ethical or physical commitments. Fred Kleinberg paints after his paintings Odyssey, heroes who are spiritual remedies in the face of collapses and disasters.

What are they for us? “Exemplary” beings, legends that take charge of the sentimental and significant power of myths?

I have always disliked certain analytical, detached and indifferent discourses about heroes, referring them to their only ideological, military or illusory dimensions. These positions were fairly widespread in our “end of the century” society, which thought it was free from major conflicts, focused on the prospects and promises of progress. They ridiculed or censored the figures of the hero, referring to a hardware store of pious images for naive and exalted people. It was no longer useful to see everyone's own light, these individuals were no longer just a systemic effect. The courage of a single person was no longer valuable in the face of the mechanics of history.

The hero, a term that is always difficult to use, is an ambivalent image where the psychological, while it reduces the admiration of some, allows, for others, immediate fraternity. Our rhetoricians talked about the real motivations of the heroes, personally I preferred to look at, as a “chance”, their figures who inspired me, far removed from Saint-Sulpician images.

In Fred Kleinberg's studio, I was surprised and happy to discover and share, through painting, the energy of those who allowed him to build his work, his life, in the material and intangible experience of art. His heroes did not correspond to the definition of “standing” characters. There were no “workbenches” or monuments. They made up a diverse population of writers, painters, musicians, musicians, musicians, scientists, scientists, scientists, scientists, activists, swimmers, characters from all worlds inducing intelligence, a fight, a poetics that we humbly, secretly need in order to think about the world and invent a life for ourselves.

Some are recognized, others not... But aren't these heroes the energy cores we welcome to find or continue the path we're looking for?

Perhaps I am more a believer than an analytic being? This question of the tension between these two poles is raised through films like Ordet by Carl Dreyer or Breaking the Waves by Lars von Trier. In this last opus, regardless of the disappointing or desperate state of the world, you have to know how to “break the waves” to resist and invent, dangerously, an ideal of love that in no way corresponds to the conformism and morality of the society that surrounds it. This ideal, this lived utopia, in one or other of these fictions, is inspired by Christ but resolutely against dogmas. They have the audacity to assert their vision against the imitation and sleepwalking of rules disconnected from the state of the world. They may not sum up a hero, but there is no heroism without that. It does not necessarily take on the paroxysmal and miraculous aspect of these two works. We know that it can be as veiled, discreet, to the point of remaining ignored as that of Just, saving hundreds of Jews from the horror of the Second World War. It is undoubtedly so in a number of actions, helping, saving, at the risk of their reputation, their career, their lives, other beings in the grip of the violent collapse of the world that inhabits the contemporary landscape.

Call them what you want! These heroes are essential for our lives. Those of Fred Kleinberg are so many “white stones” drawing the path, beyond apathy, of the scenes in his series “Red Society” beyond powerlessness.

It is not a question of inventing “the life of the saints”, of an epic in which we did not participate, but of having guidelines, however fragile or uncertain, to with them, consolidate an existence and imagine a daily destiny, useful to others.

Isn't that the case with Rosa Parks, Émile Zola, Martin Luther King of course, but also, more subjectively, with Frida Kahlo, James Baldwin or closer to home with Yusra Mardini, Oksana Chatchko, Joe Strummer... Some of the portraits painted by Fred Kleinberg.

I don't think it's a “Personal Hall of Fame.” Heroes, I think, don't think much about the Pantheon.

Through this choice, the painter tries to understand how much The other allows us to imagine, through a kind of conversation, their beneficial presence. In this relationship there are strengths that we lack. Heroes, because we are looking for them, are stars whose light continues to reach us. They are the “others” that Emmanuel Levinas speaks of: “Others are not only known, they are welcomed. It is not only named but also invoked. To put it in terms of grammar, others do not appear in the nominative but in the vocative.” . (In Difficult freedom, Coll. Espaces Libres, Paris, Paris, Albin Michel, 2023, p. 24)

Here, I remember these strange attitudes, where it was fashionable to highlight the contradictions of the Resistance in France. In some writings, she was nothing more than a swamp of political struggles, betrayals, conspiracies from abroad, etc. It was very sad to see these people, having fought to the end against the Nazi dictatorship and its collaborators, buried in the bottom of an old dusty bag of the “world before”, while their lives, their ideas, their experiences are safe channels, in 2023, to raise a life.

Sometimes the hustle and bustle of some makes you mute. Jean Moulin and the Affiche Rouge group became, in the most exclusive sense, “foreigners”. A sad silence then takes hold of you, waiting to find a friendly word, in an unexpected mouth like that of Arthur Teboul, singer of the group Feu! Chatterton.

I also remember my smile when, on the terrace of a café, one sunny day, I read on Instagram that Jacques Perrin, actor, producer, director and unforgettable sailor in love with Demoiselles de Rochefort, expressing his doubts about the state of our society, confided to Figaro How much did he miss the presence of a man like Jean Moulin. He believed that “exemplarity was the most necessary thing. People who allow us to believe. Like Jean Moulin in the Resistance. We are living in dark times said Brecht. But clarity is a dark matter” (Le Figaro, April 21, 2022). The words of this creator, in the full exercise of his life, allowed me to think that many people last, happy, secretly smile when I noticed that the example of an official, a cartoonist in his spare time, “a man made of all other men and who is worth all other men and who is worth all of them and who is worth anyone” (In Jean-Paul Sartre, The words, Paris, Gallimard, 1964) was still “a living matter”.

This is a hero, this living force that continues to irrigate a conception of ethics, of action, of thought.

In talking to Fred Kleinberg, our words preserved the sustainability of their action in us. A hero is not celebrated, he is a presence comparable to that of painting or poetry, a permanent silent source.

Roger Vailland declared that after the deceptions of Stalinist history, he would never hang a photo of a man on his walls again. He was wrong to do it. A hero does not appear, he is a mysterious energy that a painter can paint, that a poet can write. It is the promise of a movement, of a metamorphosis for those who keep it in themselves.

It is the form of spiritual thought, both visible and invisible. I believe that whatever the memory or the oblivion, it expresses a breath, a passage, a flow that recalls the hopes of a life that, regardless of the perils and risks, seek a peace, for him with others, that the world, as it is, does not bring him.

This principle of passage does not open up to the order of things. It escapes their weight. He says no to things. ” It's OK to say no” said the artist Bernard Bazile.

‍Olivier Kaeppelin

curator, art critic and writer. ‍