Rainer Fetting Neue Bilder/ New Works: deschler. [ ] GALERIE 19 april- 1 Juli 2011 August Str 61. Berlin 10117. DE, by, craniv boyd.

Rainer Fetting Neue Bilder/ New Works: deschler. [    ] GALERIE 19 April- 1 Juli 2011 August Str 61. Berlin 10117. DE, by, craniv boyd.

 

For dripping wet figurative expressionist painting of men at the beach, amongst other subjects, look to the knock out, painting show, by German painter Rainer Fetting, inspired by vacation time spent, at an small German island on the North sea, Sylt. Rainer Fetting just happens to be one of the seasoned generation of painters who kept, making large, rich, and nasty oil images despite falling in and out of love with the nineteen eighties New York art scene, and the fickle tastes of said city. The fact that, as a painting survivor rather than art world casualty Fetting has this gallery exhibition of, the artists, recent, unapologetic leisure time genre painting coupled with a retrospective at a sizable, State museum, the Berlin State museum of Modern Art, Photography and Architecture. Rainer Fetting could be seen, by many, as one lucky, wild expressionist, enviable painter.

 

The works at his Berlin gallery, are of the sea, men surfing, bathing, playing ball, a wild half naked man holding dead albatross in his bare hands, a corpulent woman wading in the water, threatening swells and atmospheric captures of Fantastic moments island life offers, that could look like a snapshot, were it not for the means of both expressionist material laden painting method, and the imagination of Fetting, exemplified in the synthetic nature of his choice in subject matter, hardcore gestures, and bevy of materialistic paint application.

 

Rainer Fetting is a painter, whom it would appear judging by the paintings, shown in this exhibition alone, has the looks of a man who likes to throw paint around. This caviler approach to figurative painting inclusive of quasi-random aggressive paint throwing was part of what contributed to the look of, the late English painter, Sir Francis Bacon. In a painting like Fetting's Ball Players, blue paint splatter marks are much the more; integrated in the expressionist-mimetic, weave of the painting's image. Blue thrown paint, is also the wetness of the North Sea where the young playing men flip and tumble in their watery game.

 

The larger format works of distanced seascapes and vantage points that show the meeting point of tourist trap small town and unruly ocean, call to mind disaster movies or sea disaster situations, people who see movies do not have to look too deeply toward Hollywood, for films like 2012, or the, opening 15 minute passage of the more sensitive Hereafter, 2010 directed by C. Eastwood, for the ocean, having a severe temper tantrum. The expressionism and the massiveness of the gnarly sea as contrasted with the little people wearing bright yellow rain slickers, is droll, not in a demeaning way, but there is a pleasant irony at hand in the large paintings that Fetting has painted newly of the sea.

 

The exhibition has a street level and a basement level, in the basement level there are more intimate, smaller format painted studies, that have flowers, and torsos of men in bikini, still lives and neoclassical interests of the male semi nude, via expressionism the loose, yet deft, hand of the painter is to bee seen in the beauty which he seeks to portray for his new series. By craniv boyd.