Drama, Mystery and Redemption in the work of Klaus Berends
All of the scenic and aesthetic elements that Kalus Berends has been elaborating during the past decade had to converge sooner or later to achieve synthesis. This, the culmination of a long standing vital dynamic process and the qualitative transformation of disperse things is what has in effect occurred in We are the salt of the earth. Initially, this exhibition-installation, a scenario for the creation an dinterpretation of atmospheres, seems far simpler than the megaproject which was Renewal Parts. To a large extent, the concepts and the precepts that animated that initiative are repeated, meanings are crossed, the past ie recreated and proyected, the ruin is visited and symbol is considered. There is a great diversity of artistic media and the nature of things created is equally diverse: painting, installation, sound project, objects, sculpture and environmental art. Nonetheless, the diversity which characterizes Berend’s artistic work on reality and its phenomena finds in We are the salt of the earth a succinct and ordered expression.
Berends explores and develops all kinds of messages: the tragedy of immigration, the alchemical and physiological symbolism of salt, dramatic illumination, the recovery of ruins, interaction with the public, the classical visit to an installation, a sound project, the neoromanticism of the ruin, the contrast between chance and conscious creation. The sense of innovation is brought on by the convergence of all these meanings in the same space, thus overcoming discontinuity and dispersion, fragmentation and dissemination. This is the most important symbolic value apparent in this fresh artisitic initiative; the beauty of what has been created and the coherence of the intentions behind it are a landmark of maturity and excellence. Before going to the classification of the registers present in this multiple experience, it is a good idea to underline the formal coincidence between certain aspects and materials present in We are the salt of the earth and the parallell references in Canoe or Renewal Parts. I must point out that the essential does not lie in these echoes and affinities but in the extradimension they have acquired in this project.
Berends has chosen an old desalination plant in the Borough of Tuineje, Fuerteventura, to house the project. Ths installation is divided into two separate and communicating spaces, the first with an area of 90m2 and the second with an area of 120m2. The tons of sea salt, the symbolic coprotagonist of the project, occupy the larger space. The fact of pouring twelve tons of sea salt onto the floors of the old factory determines the first conceptual antagonism for in so doing the artist alludes to the mineral that the rudimentary plant extracted from sea water and thus cancels all valid references to the original function fo the building. The status of industrial ruin that the building can claim is very relative; the factory seems a typical example of „adapted technology“, that principle of Schumacher who insisted on taking to the humblest parts of the globe an almost preindustrial technology easily workable and simplified in its operation. Compared to the actual massive desalination plant of Las Palmas, the Tuineje factory refers us to another concept of time and to another kind of technological reality which has ennables the artist to project the aesthetic experience and the meanings chosen. Isolation, reduced scale, rudimentary productive capacity and the quick obsolescence of the building are factors that ideally suit Berends’s artistic sensibility that requires for efficient development the availability of malleable spaces. The spatial contrast with the Renewal Parts project is therefore radical. The colossal run aground ruin of the once majestic SS.America is the antithesis of this small and homely industrial ruin, although the idea of the transatlantic ship´s space was not limited to its vast size, the Ocean and the shore. Space transgressed into the territory of recovered and recreated areas, of ship reports and letters, of broken up deck sections. We are the salt of the earth proposes to us the experience of encapsulation, of the neat limits of space, something that aids stage design; it is totally different to the explosion of space in all vastness which the rapidly corroding vessel offered the artist. Overhanging the tallest and squarest part of the old plant is the symbol of the show, its sign and mark. I refer obviously to the skelettal boat pictorially set against the outer wall’s white mass, a boat that not only connects us to the imaginary voyage of the SS.America but even to more distant things, to those primitive craft that were at the heart of the Canoe Project.
Other derelict parts of the hanging boat or patera(1), have been transformed into sculptures, sculptures halfway between surrealism’s objet trouvé and traditional sculptural identity. Both in Canoe and Renewal parts Berends aesthetically and ingeniously ornamented a primitive impulse; to make out of the big ship a floating toy for the child, to reduce the scale symbolically so that the great object could penetrate the domestic universe, and thus penetrate memory and conscience, becoming a fetiche fixed in the mind. This way of proceeding is a tendency in him, and thus inherent, revealing a ritualistic mode which intervenes in the making of his art. Everything that has monumental character in his work and is formally presented in that way, (the size of the transatlantic ship, the archetypal shape of the canoe), then acquires the dimension of a manageable object which refers us to man’s intimacy: childhood, memory, home. These objects are fragile and delicate, they become the artist’s notes. Going back to the external dimension and before considering the small vessel created in the process of the exhibition we must consider the status of the ruin contained in virtually destroyed patera. Its symbolic suspension over the white surface of the wall lends it a visual force that immediately reminds us of other ruins used to create beauty and tension in the landscapes of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. I mean of course the mobile sculptures of Cesar Manrique and his assemblage pieces, inspired by new french realism and incorporated into his building projects when not installed in solitary enclaves. Berend’s ruins, despite their monumental presence belong to another less pictorial tradition, based on an ethical relation between form, presence and reception, a relation active in much twentieth century conceptualism. The second boat in We are the salt of the earth sets aside the romantic condition of the ruin in order to direct us to the kernel of political conflict. Berends recovers another patera, this time almost intact and instals it as a real vehicle within the plant. There are then two vessels, one acting primarily as a symbol, treated and rated by the artist as a ruin, the other appropiated to perform a dramatic part as a commentary on the drama of illegal immigration. Using the artificial light provided by spotlights set up in the interior of an old cylindrical tank Berends creates the sensations of a moonlit and nocturnal ocean crossing. The patera, a fragile craft by definition, can at any moment be overrun by a coastal patrol boat. Just by directing the floolights towards the patera a long journey comes to an end. This political realism with its global moral implications contrasts markedly with the historical implications that coloured a great deal of the Renewal Parts project or with the aesthetic and philosophical significances that the idea of the ruin provokes. Both kinds of meaning are produced in the same space: outside we find the ship as artistic symbol and inside the ship as part of theatre. The meanings of light Before concluding the lengthy experience of Renewal Parts Berends decided to take leave of the colossal ruin with a grand nocturnal illumination of the ship, which by then had been reduced to half its size by the sea.
The dramatic and wondrous emotions that the illumination produced fortunately were preserved by photographs, at least photography recorded the pictorial effects that created thjis drama. That night the sea was calm and soft. Shape and texture, mass and size were beautifully clear. Nothing perturbed the majestic ruin. The supreme instant, one which intensified the ruin almost supernaturally came with dawn, provoking the fusion of two states of light, the natural and the artificial. The illumination project emphasized the presence and the valuable essence of the ruin while simultaneously heightening the awareness of environmental forces in clash, the man made ship with nature. Light also fulfilled a multiplying function of experience in the exhibition of Renewal Parts. The daylight appearance and visit to the installed objects, paintings and sculptures, which were set up on an imaginary deck contrasted radically with the nocturnal allure and visit, which caused the public to feel sensations of mystery and initiation. Light, as can be glimpsed from these descriptions,is another recurrent protagonist of Berend’s art, because its use and manipulation transform the perception of what has been created, introducing ambivalence to meaning. The careful atmosphere of lighting in Renewal Parts reached climax when the spotlights were trained on the mass of the sculpted wooden ships, projecting giant shadows onto the walls. In We are the salt of the earth light is intrinsic to experience, and rather than talking about illumination we should talk of an applied medium, of a physical force that structures an art work. The stride forward is again qualitative. The artificially generated light substitutes the moon, and it represents the other fifty per cent of the show. The old iron container, once the tank that received the desalinated water, is turned into a huge spotlight; the subtle moon circle reflected onto the white sheet hanging on the wall is produced by an industrial ruin. We step into magical realism, as Franz Roh called it in 1925. In this case, a broken down tank in a decrepit factory becomes an object capable of symbolic life. We discover a new order and a new exaltation of space as a result of the recovery of these banal technological ruins, that have been transformed into props for art, drama and theraphy.
The magical atmosphere of the salt’s white landscape is produced by the light emitted from the tank. This environmental function contrasts radically with the other implications of light: the patrol boat’s spotlight that halts and brings to an end the patera’s journey. Two states and two antagonical conditions acting in the same symbolic space. The metaphysics of landscape and police repression. Beyond this initial symbolic ambivalence the double condition of light in We are the salt of the earth produces effects and interpretations very different to what is solely produced by the scenic elements, the salt and the vessels.
Seen in daylight from the bow end and with the prow elevated, the patera offers an optimistic and heroic image of voyage. The daily image of the journey and the nocturnal image propose divergent realities. Seen from the prow end under the spotlighting, that we know to be a metaphor for the end of the journey, the patera becomes tragic. The day image of the salt with its resplendent crystals and its chemical and symbolic properties of conservation and purification floods the exhibition. The nocturnal image of the salt conveys the occult and secret qualities of minerals; the nightly salt is submitted to the dominant dramatic emotions, it exists as landscape, its artistic morphology is preeminent.
Finally, to end these considerations on the nature of light, we have to mention the dominant role of the colour white in all of Berend’s work. The large white sheet covering one of the walls of the plant reminds us of the great white shirt that was hung in the San Antonio Abad gallery of Las Palmas in 1994; two natural screens that reflect light, at the same time living and moving surfaces that suggest idealism. The symbolism of the sheet coincides with the symbolic presence of the salt in the exhibition. Berends has always sought the white properties of all the objects that he has created, the canoe in white paper or the white sailing ship resting on a cushion.
White has also emerged as counterpoint in his pictorial image, acting as times as a purifying background or as the primeval symbol of a state that leads us to the origin. This installation, seen formally in terms of colour is a visual and lyrical work in white, on account of the salt, on account of the white light and on account of the linen sheet. White is simultaneously present in the creative process that has led to the show, in the musical inspiration that has been underlying although it is not immediately apparent. I mean the use Berends has made of the music of Arvo Pärt, the finnish composer, who returns once and again to the concept of white light in his oeuvre. The role of painting Painting in its traditional form is also present in We are the salt of the earth. Nevertheless, the notion of pictorial image is fully subservient to the physical realities of the building, that has itself generated a kind of painting. Berends conjugates painting with the specific atmosphere of the old factory and the outcome is such a complete integration of the appearance of the painted work into the physical appearance of the walls that painted image lies almost occult. This projection of pictorial consciousness onto very determinant supports was very evident in Renewal Parts, manifested in a particular and singular piece, a painted object. The painted image was fixed to a section of the SS. America deck. The eroded teak wood strips acted as natural contrast to the painted image which in turn was an icon that simulated the process of environmental decay slowly engulfing the huge ruin. Berends aped the chemistry of deterioration using natural pigments and then polishing the surface in order to highlight aesthetically the process of corrosion on a vast scale. The act of painting was absorbed into the ruinous state of the support used. At the same time Berends developped his habitual pictorial surfaces that depended on monochromatism and limited tonal variation, the hallmark of all his landscape abstract image since the 90’s. In one case he chose to project the symbol of Chandris Lines, (a white diagonal cross over pale blue), though most of the pictures that were seen in Renewal Parts played allegorically on the theme of the Atlantic and the ruin, painted in two dominant pigments, lapis lazuli blue and iron oxide. The iconographical project of the exhibition was much more formal, not forgetting of course the described essay in integrated painting. In We are the salt of the earth painting does not transform or adapt the physical and chemical reactions of dampness and humidity. On the contrary, painting tries to insinuate itself into the building’s natural state of decrepitude, proceeding to underline everything that to the imagination appears an aesthetic art process of nature. The dimensions of each painting or of every pictorial area are defined by space available between vertical supports. The walls have been used as prepainted canvasses whose frames are provided by the series of columns and beams supporting the weight of the ceiling.
The most monumental size pictorial intervention is called, in reference to Leonardo’s immortal icon, The Last Supper. In the largest wall space Berends has found the clearest example of one of Leonardo’s theories on the natural essence of abstraction, the famous description that he made of how a simple damp patch could be studied and considered as a symbol of artistic process. Furthermore, it is impossible not to think about the actual state of conservation of Leonardo’s Last Supper, which has become a grand irrecoverable ruin. The humidity of the wall, temperature changes and time have blurred the marvellous subtle traces of the leonardesque composition, fixed onto a monastery wall. These natural factors have exercised further distorting dissolution on an image that was already blurry to begin with, given the Master’s use of the sfumato technique, a technique that spiritualised human form and presence. Berends has reversed the order of events, for he has tried to appropiate time’s pictorial capacity, incorporating it into We are the salt of the earth. Thus, through the deepest implications of the survival of image, the dimension of time is intensified in the installation, something that has the effect of rendering it even more intemporal. Pictorial also, and in a very classical sense, is the manipulation of light on the artist’s behalf. On the wall onto which has been transferred the naturalistic metaphor of the Last Supper the artist has superimposed other pictorial techniques. This time however, the method is external and not internal, it has nothing to do with abstraction but with the role of artifice. The artificial lighting and the atmosphere of the plant during the night generate a kind of blue mist that transforms the appearance and the qualities of the wall. By day, the brilliance of the salt together with natural light whiten and purify that same image. Finally, the nocturnal landscape of salt emphasizes the most classical effects of chiaroscuro illumination. The nocturnal salt landscape with its radical shadows makes me think about the famous image that Henri Rousseau devoted to the desert. The radical application of shadow that indirect illumination introduced altered the course of western painting, first with Caravaggio, and then with the long trail of his followers, from the School of Utrecht painters to the french masters, Georges de la Tour, Valentin de Boulogne, Nicolas Tournier. Painting in We are the salt of the earth is subliminally represented through the exercise of light.
The objects Each new creative episode in Berends’s career that culminates in a show or installation includes the production of objects or small sculptures, another fundamental trend of his aesthetics. His objects are the symbolic individual representation of the general ideas present in his exhibitions, acting as microcosmic references for broader lines of thought. In this sense the objects are symbols that operate as symbols of other meanings. Berend’s objects also tell us their own stories, because they establish dialogue around images and signs that recur in his shows, creating a progressive narrative of evolving ideas.
They are then both complementary pieces in a general dialogue and generators of their own meanings. This discursive capacity of the sculpture-objects or the small sculptures was expressed with richness, strength and beauty in the exhibition dedicated to one of Italo Calvino’s most complex and aesthetically mature novels, The Invisible Cities. Berends was able to prove then something that has become a constant trait of his art, an ability to transfer to almost any material the moral and the aesthetic values to be found in literature. In Canoe, we could observe two parallel symbolic aspects. One was the long series of small paintings, that in many instances were icons in relief due to the barroque qualities of texture and materials; the other was the recovered and the created objects with specific ends, among them, for example, the three little canoes floating in water inside three watertight glass containers. In Renewal Parts the object gained dramatic power, reminding us more directly the dadaist and surrealist principles of the objet trouvé and assemblage. All the small debris and burocratic waste that the artist amassed during his hazardous visits to the ruin eventually led to the idea of the Souvenirs.
Some of these were simple sailing ships, (perhaps the single most recurrent leitmotif in of Berend’s object world), others alluded to classical art masters and a further group to specific journeys, (like Passing trough the Equator or Souvenir of the Persian Gulf). Within this abundant array of objects there was a final category, aplicable to those objects which had undergone qualitative aesthetic transformation; it was difficult to define, in general it was related to the degree of aesthetic conscience manifested and to a degree of formal refinement and presentation of the composition. These objects Berends chose to present on cushions, the case of Childhood, (1995), the model of a toy sailing ship and Not is our area, a large, intact industrial bulb on a blue velvet cushion. They were transcended objects.
The objects created for We are the salt of the earth establish thematic correspondencies with objects of previous exhibitions. We have two sailing boats, one of horizontal shape and wide, very abstract, since only the wire that riggs both parts of the piece together suggests it is a marine craft, and another, very tall, with a single dominant vertical mast. These sailing boat objects connect with the object vessels of Renewal Parts, once again takins us back to the idea of the child with his toy boat and the symbolism of knowledge and discovery that childhood implies. Another small scale boat makes us remember the primeval canoe, whcih Berends had already developped as an image of the most primitive vehicle. This specific boat when carefully observed is the replica of a patera, and therefore emphasizes the political critical aspects of the exhibition. We could easily juxtapose it with one of the many little boats that the cuban contemporary artist Kacho has built, boats intended to create one of the most dramatic and overpowering visual similes of cuban emigration to the northamerican continent, a tragedy that is now being repeated in the slightly less dangerous waters that separate the Canary Islands from the african continent. Berends also sculpts on local mauve coloured stone the Knight Templar’s cross, directing us to other crosses that have appeared in his past work, especially those crosses in Canoe that marked the lethal graveyards created by the dumping of radioactive waste in the Azores, Madeira and Canary area of the Atlantic Ocean. The symbol of the cross has also acquired in Berend’s work a moral and anthropological connotation. Classical in the example of the multpile sculpture, The Myth of Sisyphus, anthropological in the symbolic force acquired in his paintings as the sign and mark of Mankind. Salt, the common condiment of our european table, an alchemical end product of capital importance and a conductor of electricity. Salt is the great religious symbol of this recent and multiple work by Berends. Salt, with all its literal and occult meanings is the ideal metaphor that will conserve and crystallise the many layers of meaning and the aesthetic of association prevalent in this new and personal evolution.
(1). A patera is a spanish term that is used to describe the basic wooden, low-lying rowing boat used for the crossing to mainland Spain or the Canary Islands by immigrants from the Mahgreb and sub-saharian Africa.