“Buildings and walls may be erected and razed, but something about the city always stays the same. Gray, sunless Berlin with its sullen, underfed inhabitants who only come out at night. Berlin in dim, chronically underlit bars where you have to squint through an alcoholic haze of stale smoke to find love. Berlin with its manic summers, where sweaty flesh presses against cool foliage in an orgiastic pagan ecstasy of reawakening. The city oozes melancholia more than any other place on the planet. Whatever color and brightness one can find in its craggy grayness can only be attributed to an extraordinary act of willpower, which often manifests itself in Fetting’s palette, revealing both the sensibility of ein Wilder (as he was branded early on by the art establishment) and an eye that is capable of transforming ambiguous emotions into clear forms and cohesive colors through a bewildering act of synaesthesia.”

My essay, “Five Paintings by Rainer Fetting,” appears in the catalog of his current exhibition at the Berlinische Galerie.

Another essay appears in Manscapes, the catalog of Rainer Fetting’s solo exhibition last year at Kunsthalle Tuebingen.