Píntalo otra vez, Toni / Paint it again Toni

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!"

In modern art, and especially in contemporary art, there are many examples that penetrate a three-dimensional space conceived by the artist, starting with Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau , and including Claes Oldenburg's Bedroom Ensemble , Ed Kienholz's bar The Beanery , Ben's La Boutique , Jean Dubuffet's Le Cabinet Logologique , the Hon by Saint Phalle, Tinguely and Ultredt; Joseph Beuys's Plight , and Graham and Wall's Children's Pavilion , and ending with the houses created by Pipilotti Rist and Gregor Schneider. They have all countered the white cube with a different, specific, form of space, to show elements that are not identified immediately as objects of art. Anton Henning addresses the issue by doing the exact opposite. He installs a private exhibition hall in the public exhibition venue, like a lounge for the petite bourgeoisie. Whilst Henning's paintings often tend towards the kitsch , he assumes the vertiginous risk of sinking even further into bad taste by hanging them in mauve settings, that are reminiscent of the Sixties and Seventies, but are the exact opposite, for instance, of the shining environments proposed by Italian designers from Archizoom and Superstudio, with loud colours and a defence of progress. Henning's art is the perfect reflection of a world that has lost its shine. Or, as critic Niklas Maak said: "Henning reveals the discomfort of a restoring and disoriented era."

With the skill of a master chess player, Henning, on the one hand, rejects the marketing strategy of the furniture seller like the avant-garde artists from Düsseldorf did in the Sixties, and, on the other, he embraces certain customs of the furniture seller that link him to the representatives of capitalist realism (Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter), who actually showed their work for the first time in a furniture shop in Düsseldorf. Henning's advantage is that he envelops everything, from floor to ceiling, including the walls, without questioning if it is art, but asserting that it is "a quite beautiful painting" ( Ziemlich Schöne Malereien , the title of his 2003 show at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne). Whilst some neo avant-garde artists have taken, one by one and structurally and radically, the floor (Carl André), the walls (Blinky Palermo) and the ceiling (Lucio Fontana) as the setting and topic of their works, Henning covers the whole room like a dancer would in Hollywood's musical comedies, floor-wall-ceiling-floor, to then, after occupying the entire space, hang his own canvases just like that. From the very moment he sets foot in the museum, Henning takes the invitation "make yourself at home" word for word.

Henning is obviously not a revolutionary. He plays his game in a well-defined enclosure, that of the artistic institution: a gallery, art centre, museum. In terms of the museum, once inside, he works on permanently destabilising the viewers. He pampers them with cushions, that is to say, he offers maximum comfort, much more than the hard wooden or marble benches that the public institution offers when it shows a minimum of concern towards the visitors. Yet this soft comfort is a trap. Anyone who hopes to nap among the walls organised like a labyrinth with white lines and mauve fields should be wary. The artist's twisted, fragmented aesthetics do not offer the most minimum respite. In contrast, the device of couches and armchairs has been conceived so that you can interact with other viewers. You are not just contemplating paintings, you are also surrounded by other viewers.

We contemplate them together, to understand that, most surely, we do not all see the same thing. The multiplicity of senses produced by the Henningian ensemble composes one of his strengths. Henning's lounge satisfies the most heterogeneous audience. He gathers diametrically opposed positions, ranging from the modern and contemporary art connoisseur to the tourist that visits a museum once a year. Thus, a sunset painted in the most insipid manner, using street market aesthetics, can awaken enthusiasm in the ignorant visitor and acceptance in the cultured viewer. The former enjoys the warm colours that remind him of his summer holidays, whilst the latter, who rejects the triviality of the painting, values the canvas' transgressor aspect. The Henning Salon invites us to break the silence typical of museums, as occurred in Parisian salons between the 17 th and 19 th centuries, where loud discussions took place. Evidently, the Henning salon does not solve the social and political antagonisms that oppose the different viewers, but it creates the conditions for a possible debate. In the Frankfurter Salon , the artist had even left newspapers, magazines and books for the discussions to incorporate a social debate. This is how a combination of such different aesthetics can create its own scenery for a controversy that springs from the potential seed carried by the combination itself.

Mirroring political art, which currently places benches and tables for the viewers who want to analyse the contents proposed in the exhibition in detail, Henning invites visitors to stop for a moment to think about the paintings on show. In a sense, it is as if the artist appropriated a sentence attributed to Matisse -the quote is approximate-: "My paintings are made for the tired bourgeois business man who can come home and relax looking at them in his rocking chair." Soon enough, following the meanders of a line in one of his canvases, the viewer is immersed in questions about truth and falseness, beauty and ugliness, purity and impurity.

Most of the contextual art of the Nineties, with its institutional criticism, was absorbed quite quickly, by the institution, which, in the best cases, grew from it. Henning's salons are more ambiguous in their eventual criticism of the institution, since they only question it with aesthetical values.