Píntalo otra vez, Toni / Paint it again Toni

Fuelled by the museum, Henning returns to it the paintings that have marked him, incorporating them in the setting, summoning Polke, Van Gogh, Courbet, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Stella, Chardin, Warhol... He summons these artists -as if he were summoning them before the judge- without wanting to appropriate them. He summons them as witnesses to their own actions. He returns them to the museum in their kitsch form, as occurs with the people who buy in the museum gift shops, who go home and stick a postcard with a bunch of flowers painted by Van Gogh, Matisse or Warhol on their fridge with a magnet. Henning, however, extracts these artists to combine them with his own proposals in a space that becomes his museum, or, more precisely, his ideal hall in a museum. Without having been rejected, he conceives an entire space, somewhat like Courbet, who, after having been honoured and then expelled from the Salon, ordered the construction of his own pavilion in the 1855 World Fair, with the proud title of " G. Courbet's Realism."

Courbet saw realism essentially as a democratic art, where nothing was unworthy of art. Thus, his art accepted everything. Whilst Courbet had no qualms about painting the life of the lower classes dominated by work, Henning had no qualms about painting the aspects of the culture of those classes. Those kitsch images, which beautify everything and reduce it all to good feelings, are, evidently, not realistic. Yet, as a good realist, they find shelter in Henning.

The revolution long-awaited by the avant-garde artists did not trigger, when it actually took place, that new society in which the conscience of the people rose progressively to the level of the artists' and intellectuals', not during the fascist era in Italy, nor during the communist era in Russia. However, in countries where the revolution did take place, i.e. in the capitalist countries, the popular culture, with all its derivates, had a strong influence on the dominant art. The effect that had already appeared in the musical and literary media as of Romanticism -the integration of elements from the popular culture-, took place in the plastic arts and the industrial societies as of the historical avant-gardes and, especially, with the post-avant-gardes of the Fifties and Sixties, and more blatantly, surely, with Pop Art.

Henning could even be suspected of using kitsch as a strategy to see what is true and what is false. This way of perceiving truth as falseness is an obsession in the artist and his work is marked by a plethora of questions, either using visual procedures like trompe l'oeils (the table that presents a full meal but is actually a painting) or as the effect of a laughing cow (one of Henning's canvases that is reminiscent of Courbet's La rencontre in a painting that represents one of his salons; or the photograph in which the artist appears three times in the roles of three different pop musicians, or the one where he appears painting his portrait outdoors, holding a paintbrush in one image and a spoon in another).

The Berlin artist's attitude could be considered in the light of the camp concept that Susan Sontag analysed in 1964, when Pop art was in full swing. The conception recognises the existence of bad taste, and values it positively, returning to it because of its provocative nature. The New York essayist had observed that camp enthusiasm was expressed in formulae like "It's too fantastic" or "It's too much." I bet Anton Henning's first catalogue in an art institution was called: 2 much for a good thing .

Anton Henning's oeuvre is a system that asserts itself and then contradicts itself immediately, that produces -and this is not even a metaphor- its own rug to then -and this is a metaphor- sweep it out from under its feet. One enters Henning's oeuvre metaphorically, and also physical. Tiptoeing -in slippers-, carefully taking one step after another. If you get out of your depth, the wind will definitely be taken out of your sails.

Translation: Laura F. Farhall