Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: Rainer Fetting does not merely paint nude bodies or urban landscapes, he dissects the soul of an era where reality volatilizes before our eyes. This native of Wilhelmshaven, born in 1949, has spent his career transforming Berlin’s brutality into chromatic poetry, but beyond this superficial evidence, his work reveals an intuitive understanding of what Jean Baudrillard would call the hyperreality of our contemporary condition. In a world where simulacra have replaced the authentic, Fetting erects his canvases as bastions of resistance against the conceptual uniformity that has plagued art since the seventies.
Co-founder of the Galerie am Moritzplatz in 1977, alongside Salomé, Helmut Middendorf and Bernd Zimmer, Fetting immediately aligns himself with the “Neue Wilde” movement that swept Germany at the turn of the eighties. But reducing his journey to this single label would be to display regrettable critical myopia. For if the German “New Fauves” react viscerally against the cold intellectualism of conceptual and minimal art, Fetting pushes this revolt much further, into unexplored territories where the intimate and the political, the corporeal and the urban, the real and its representation meet.
The man who interests us here is neither a nostalgic nor a reactionary. Trained in carpentry before joining the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts under the direction of Hans Jaenisch, Fetting possesses that tactile knowledge of matter which is apparent in each of his pictorial gestures. His brushes do not caress the canvas, they plow it, digging colored furrows where the affects of a generation torn between the heritage of the German past and the promises of an uncertain future nestle. This gesture, both brutal and sensual, finds its fulfillment in works that directly challenge the very notion of representation.
Simulacrum and image: Fetting in the light of Baudrillard
To grasp the profound originality of Fetting’s enterprise, it should be confronted with the analyses that Jean Baudrillard develops in Simulacra and Simulation [1]. The French philosopher describes a world where “the simulacrum is never what hides the truth, it is the truth that hides that there is none”. This affirmation, which might seem cryptic, nevertheless sheds new light on the work of our German painter. For Fetting, unlike many of his contemporaries, does not seek to create simulacra, those copies without an original that populate our media environment. He strives instead to find, beneath the layers of artifice that cover our era, something that would resemble a primal truth.
Let’s consider his famous representations of the Berlin Wall. When Fetting paints “Erstes Mauerbild” in 1977, he does not merely document a geopolitical reality. He reveals the deeply theatrical essence of this border, transformed by the media into a planetary symbol of the world’s division. But where Baudrillard would diagnose the “precession of simulacra”, this process by which the map precedes the territory, Fetting operates in the inverse direction. His acidic colors, his generous impastos give materiality back to what was no more than a televised image. The wall regains its heaviness of concrete, its violence as a physical obstacle, its capacity to tear apart flesh as well as families.
This resistance to Baudrillard’s hyperreality is expressed with particular force in the artist’s self-portraits. When he depicts himself as Gustaf Gründgens in 1974, Fetting is not content to merely play with the codes of cross-dressing. He questions the construction of identity in a society where roles are infinitely multiplied. Gründgens, a homosexual actor who survived Nazism by cultivating the ambiguity of his position, becomes under Fetting’s brush a distorting mirror reflecting the contradictions of the era. The artist does not create another simulacrum, but reveals the fundamentally simulated nature of all social identity.
This approach finds its logical continuation in the New York paintings of the eighties. Expatriated to the American metropolis thanks to a DAAD scholarship, Fetting discovers a city that embodies all the excesses of the civilization of the image. Yet, his canvases from this period never fall into the trap of blissful celebration of the urban spectacle. His yellow cabs, his landscapes of Manhattan bathed in artificial light maintain a strangeness, a critical distance that preserves them from easy seduction. Fetting paints New York as a life-size theater, but he never lets us forget that it is indeed a theater.
Baudrillard asserts that we now live in the imaginary of the screen, of the interface and of reduplication, that is, of the production of simulacra which replace reality. Fetting seems to have sensed this major anthropological mutation. His musicians, these drummers and guitarists captured in the energy of performance, are never simple illustrations of rock’n’roll. They question our relationship to icons, to these media figures who have replaced the ancient mythological heroes. When he paints Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan, Fetting does not reproduce their official images. He recomposes them, deforms them, reveals the artifice that goes into their legendary construction.
The question of authenticity thus runs through all of Fetting’s work like a red thread. In a world where, according to Baudrillard, there is no longer any original or copy, the German artist stubbornly maintains the demand for pictorial truth. This truth does not reside in the faithfulness to an external model, but in the sincerity of the creative gesture. Each brushstroke bears the trace of a presence, of a subjectivity that refuses to dissolve into the anonymity of mass images. In this sense, Fetting paradoxically joins Baudrillard in his denunciation of the inauthentic, but where the philosopher diagnoses a historical fatality, the painter opposes the resistance of art.
Architecture and space: The phenomenology of the urban place
If the work of Fetting dialogues with Baudrillard’s analyses on the level of representation, it also finds deep resonances in contemporary architectural reflection. Fetting’s art does not merely represent urban space, it reveals its deep structure, that invisible geometry that organizes our existences. In this, it joins the concerns of architects like Daniel Libeskind or Peter Eisenman, who question the capacity of architecture to bear meaning in a disenchanted world.
Fetting’s views of Berlin, from “Alte Fabrik Moritzplatz” (1977) to the landscapes of reunification, testify to a keen understanding of space as a social construction. Berlin, a city torn apart and then mended, becomes under his brush an architectural laboratory where new ways of living are experimented with. But Fetting never positions himself as a benevolent urban planner. His gaze remains that of the artist, that is, of the one who reveals the hidden tensions, the dysfunctions, the unexpected beauties of an environment in perpetual mutation.
This sensitivity to architecture finds its most accomplished expression in the artist’s sculptures. The statue of Willy Brandt, installed at the SPD headquarters, does not merely honor the memory of the chancellor. Through its rough surfaces and deliberately imperfect volumes, it questions the status of public commission in a democratic space. Fetting rejects the smooth aesthetics of the official monument to propose an effigy that bears the stigmata of history. This assumed roughness echoes the experiments of the deconstructivist architects, who deliberately break the classical harmony to reveal the underlying conflicts of our time.
The island of Sylt, where Fetting has maintained a studio for decades, offers a necessary counterpoint to the urban bustle. But even in these seemingly idyllic landscapes, the artist maintains a critical vigilance. His Frisian houses, his dunes beaten by the north winds are never mere postcards. They question our relationship with nature in a civilization that has transformed even the wildest spaces into tourist consumer products. The wild roses of Sylt, under Fetting’s brush, become the fragile witnesses of a threatened authenticity.
This approach to space reveals a often neglected philosophical dimension of Fetting’s work. The artist does not merely paint places, he explores the way these places shape us. His New York interiors, bathed in that artificial light that knows neither day nor night, reveal the impact of architecture on our biological rhythms, our modes of relation. Similarly, his views of Berlin capture that feeling of strangeness that grips the inhabitant of a city in perpetual reconstruction.
This architectural awareness is manifested even in the composition of his canvases. Fetting structures his works as so many habitable spaces, creating areas of breathing, points of tension, perspectives that guide the gaze. His portraits themselves obey this spatial logic: the bodies he represents do not float in a neutral void, but inhabit specific environments that contribute to their definition. This attention to inhabited space places Fetting in the lineage of the great masters of interior painting, from Vermeer to Bonnard, but enriched with a contemporary awareness of urban issues.
The question of the monument also permeates Fetting’s sculptural work. His bronzes of Henri Nannen or Helmut Schmidt do not seek glorification, but rather psychological complexity. These rugged effigies, with tormented surfaces, refuse idealization to propose a more nuanced approach to collective memory. In this, Fetting joins James E. Young’s reflections on the “counter-monument”, these works that question the traditional modalities of commemoration.
This approach also reveals the lasting influence of his time in New York. The American metropolis, with its dizzying verticals and infinite horizontals, has lasting marked his conception of space. His canvases from this period explore the effects of large scale on human perception, that sensation of urban sublime that seizes the pedestrian in the canyons of Manhattan. But Fetting avoids the trap of fascination with gigantism. His New York remains on a human scale, anchored in the bodily experience of those who walk the city.
The recent evolution of his work confirms this constant concern for inhabited space. His latest series explore the transformations of contemporary Berlin, this mutation of a city of division towards a European metropolis. But always, Fetting maintains this critical distance that allows him to reveal the hidden stakes behind the most spectacular urban transformations.
The eternal question of style
At the end of this journey, a truth becomes clear: Rainer Fetting has forged a pictorial language of rare singularity in the contemporary artistic landscape. This singularity does not proceed from a search for originality at all costs, but from an inner necessity that drives the artist to invent the plastic means adequate to his purpose. His style, forged in the Berlin years of the late seventies, has evolved without ever disowning itself, testifying to an exemplary coherence.
Fetting’s technique, this very particular way of making color flow while maintaining the precision of the drawing, reveals a consummate mastery of pictorial means. His generous impastos are not gratuitous: they translate a vision of the world where matter resists, where forms do not let themselves be tamed easily. This resistance of the pictorial matter echoes the political and social resistance that the artist has always manifested in the face of the conformisms of his time.
Fetting’s use of color is particularly interesting. His acid chromatisms, far from seeking a decorative effect, translate an acute perception of the mutations of the contemporary visual environment. These screaming yellows, these electric reds, these synthetic blues bear the trace of our industrial and media age. But Fetting avoids the trap of mere denunciation. His colors, even the most artificial, retain an emotional power that redeems them from their technological origin.
Fetting’s drawing reveals a classical training never disowned. His bodies, even deformed by the expressiveness of the gesture, retain this anatomical accuracy that reveals years of patient observation. This tension between tradition and modernity, between academic knowledge and expressive freedom, constitutes one of the major strengths of his art. It allows him to avoid both the pitfall of pastism and that of the modernist tabula rasa.
The stylistic evolution of Fetting also reveals a remarkable ability to adapt to geographical and cultural contexts. His years in New York enriched his palette with a new luminosity, while his stays in Sylt refined his perception of atmospheric phenomena. This stylistic plasticity, far from revealing inconsistency, testifies to a constant attention to reality in its most diverse manifestations.
The question of influence also deserves to be raised. While Fetting openly claims his lineage with Van Gogh, Kirchner or the masters of expressionist figuration, he has never been content to reproduce their recipes. Each influence is digested, transformed, reinvented according to the necessities of his personal discourse. This ability to metabolize the legacies of the past without becoming alienated from them constitutes one of the major qualities of any great artist.
Fetting’s art reminds us that modernity does not lie in systematic rupture with the past, but in the constant ability to reinvent the means of artistic expression. In this sense, his work is part of the great tradition of European painting while taking up the aesthetic challenges of our time. This successful synthesis between continuity and innovation makes Fetting one of the most important painters of his generation.
At a time when so many artists are losing their way in the easy options of conceptual art or the seductions of the market, Fetting maintains the demand for an art that does not compromise on either plastic quality or intellectual ambition. His work reminds us that painting, far from being an outdated art, still has inexhaustible expressive resources for those who know how to explore them with intelligence and sensitivity.
Rainer Fetting has transformed the challenges of his time into opportunities for creation. In the face of the contemporary dissolution of benchmarks, he has been able to maintain the demand for an art that questions without moralizing, that reveals without dogmatizing. This lesson in artistic intelligence deserves to be meditated upon by all those who question the future of contemporary creation.
- Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Paris, Galilée, 1981.
