Píntalo otra vez, Toni / Paint it again Toni

Since the market has conquered the avant-gardes and dictates the discourse, the art medium works in the same way as capitalism in general: cyclically. A crisis in the stock market is followed by a period of euphoria, a frenzied craze about painting is followed by a period of enthusiasm about sculpture and then photography, and then, perhaps, video. The discussion about the medium has replaced the debate about ideas. Consequently, in the late Seventies and early Eighties, the artistic media declared end of the avant-gardes and the return to painting. As a result, we have recently experienced the second return of the safest stock value: painting, despite the fact that, since the 2006 Artforum Berlin fair, visionaries have already announced the return of sculpture.

Those who still reme mber the so-called return to painting over twenty years ago are perfectly aware of the brief artistic life of authors like Rainer Fetting, Elvira Bach, Luciano Castelli, Rémy Blanchard or Siegfried Anzinger. Although in 1982, Christoph Joachimides, curator of major exhibitions in the Eighties, like New Spirit in Painting or Zeitgeist , told anyone who would listen that Rainer Fetting was the new Matisse. As expected, history disagreed.

Yet, lo and behold, German painters are back on the front line of a market that has become globalised in the meantime. Evidently, this is not history repeating (otherwise, drama would become comedy), but it is interesting to see that Anton Henning is currently at the same point as Martin Kippenberger more or less twenty years ago. That is to say, backstage, not in the front row, well-known by artists and curators but not so much by the general public. Even though both universes are quite different ( trash in Kippenberger's case, artisan excellence in Henning's; the politically incorrect in Kippenberger, latent eroticism in Henning's dated world), their position on the German stage is one and the same: "semi-confidential" (suffice it to say that Kippenberger only experienced museum fame after his death). Obviously, the reference to Kippenberger is not trivial. Both artists are inscribed in the Dadaist legacy, following the Berlin-Dada-Picabia-Polke line, with a shrewd sense of humour, unbounded production and an array that includes all possible means of expression.

Towards the end of the decade, his palette got brighter, forms became more legible, abstraction started to flirt openly with ornamental procedures and the series of record covers acquired lines of colour typical of the hard-edge style, even of Noland, without the geometric straightness of that trend. Meanwhile, the nudists, followed by debutant actresses, started to inhabit his oil paintings. A helicoid shape, which Henning calls the "Hennling," a sort of clover, is ever-more present, like a parasite, in his paintings, and appears as a tattoo, tampon, piercing, logo, wallpaper, ear-ring or, even, as a monument or sculpture outside the former Palace of the Republic of the late gdr , rapidly destroyed to be replaced -oh, the epitome of kitsch in the new Republic!- by a replica of the rococo Stadschloss castle.

The kitsch universe appears increasingly in Henning's painting, from the bunches of flowers for his grandmother to the inhabited geometric abstraction. Since his return from New York, he lived between Berlin and Manker, and then settled in the latter locality, in the March of Brandenburg, sixty kilometres from the city, where he started to paint meadows, sunsets, cows grazing in the fields or an ideal stream, and self-portraits, one even in the style of Courbet, who accompanied him along a good part of the way, at least until La rencontre (where Courbet and his collector, Alfreed Bruyas, each hold a "Hennling"). Although he started out emulating the viscous textures of the Cobra painters, Henning's rural touch is as thick as that of his new "godfather," the founder of realism. If painting corrodes the artist like a drug, he is saved by a sense of humour worthy of Baader, even his capacity to laugh at himself. A small cartoon shows "Hennling" walking along the top of a white block, before losing his balance and smashing into the floor. The nine small canvases (shown in 1999 in De coraz(i)ón , in Barcelona) are entitled The Sudden and Tragic Death of Modernism No. 4 . The sculpture called Film Noir is composed by a pile of small canvases covered in different layers of colour, but all coated finally in black, placed on a white table. His capacity to mock himself appears clearly in a photograph that depicts him three times in a scene with a contemporary Ikea-like set, as the musician from The Manker Melody Makers (at home) . In an mtv video style, he performs all the activities expected of the pop group, giving interviews and playing all the instruments to the beat of music he himself composed.

Henning's oeuvre works by breaking away, as an opposition, exercising a strong seduction to pass immediately to rejection; attraction and repulsion coexist in his universe and consequently his best shows are constructed as a production, never allowing the viewer to stop and contemplate the image of an arabesque. The thread that guides his work is literally the meander. As of 1997, Henning regularly paints canvases with different superimposed lines of colour, sometimes on a square background, others as the ground on which a cow appears. There is a video in which the camera races closely after one of these sinuous lines. Henning has unquestionably learnt about the arabesque from Matisse, a lesson he reflected in a painting from 1998 that acts as a sort of key to his universe: a black curved line, painted with variable intensity, covers almost all of the white canvas and continues criss-crossing endlessly until it returns to its point of departure. It is La route des peintres .

Stretching his production logic to the limit, it is no surprise to see Henning gather all the elements to conceive entire spaces, as he did initially in the Kunstverein in Kassel in 1998, with several items of furniture, a 1960s rug and mural monochrome paintings that acted as the backdrop for his paintings. In 1999, in the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, in Leipzig, he installed The Manker Melody Maker Lounge , resembling the coolness of the hip hop generation, with furniture he designed himself combined, on this occasion, with designer pieces and striped mural paintings. In 2001, at the Städtische Ausstellungshalle am Hawerkamp, in Münster, Henning constructed his first own space. In 2003, at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, his mural paintings were composed by different sections of pastel colours, separated by white lines, which are more reminiscent of Peter Haley's structures than of Piet Mondrian's creations. Inside this distribution, Henning established specific, non-exchangeable places for his paintings, of nudes and circles, bunches of flowers and interiors resembling the space we are in, consigning everything to a notion of decoration if broken down into its individual elements or considered as a whole, as a "negative" total work of art. If Richard Wagner and all the utopians that followed him conceived the total work as a purification and a contribution to progress, when he goes to the point of even, on occasion, including canvases painted with his own exc reme nts, Anton Henning evidently represents the denial of the total work of art, although he had even been handling the lighting for some time. Harald Szeemann, author of the first and sole show that addresses this utopian elevation, told anyone who would listen: "The total work of art does not exist!"