by Bernard Goy, Director of the Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain (FRAC), in Île-de-France, Paris, 1998.
French writer and sailing enthusiast Didier Decoin eagerly explains how putting out to the sea is a real departure, whereas taking a plane boils down to spending a few hours in an enclosed space before arriving in another airport, another town, without ever being aware of the distance one has covered. The sea is both reality and fiction. Leaving dry land for the liquid element is to rediscover the meaning of each gesture one makes, is to feel the weight and fragility of one's body, is to agree to abandon a solid environment for another, more fluctuating one and to finally experience the distance which separates different worlds and the frontiers that delimit them. Like the sea, painting is both fiction and reality. Its surface is spread out before our eyes and yet we can see more than just a surface. How strange it is that in this day and age, when we are constantly beseiged by the most spectacular images, we are still so sensitive to a painting's particular kind of fiction. Perhaps without thinking we empathize with the artist's physical, mental and spiritual involvement in his work, and that we subsequently experience the duration, the risk and the joy of his accomplishment.
A painting is a work of fiction proportionate to the life of the artist and the spectator. It represents lawless interference in the collective phantasy of a global, undifferentiated world, contaminated by the instantaneous circulation of information and of monetary value. Art cannot endorse this obliteration of frontiers between things and people without losing its sovereignty in the world of the intellect. The fiction it organizes is a counterattack on the common phantasy of a spaceless, timeless world.
The authority which now allows borders to be crossed so easily is no longer military or administrative; it is controlled by commerce and the media. Under the cover of communication, it imposes an exclusive planetary model which can only result in tragic narrowing of the mind. Some of today's artists may be said to embody the splendid figure of yesterday's smuggler, who crossed mountain passes and secluded creeks to peddle illegal goods and epic poems to villagers. More attractive than that of the conqueror, this figure is also more accurate, since it evokes the sharp-wittedness of one who slips through the net held out by official recognition. Beate Elvira Renner is one of their kind. Her painting leads one astray in the finest sense of the term: It invites one to explore paths unknown to the spiritual police who guard the information highways. Even before the artist herself embarks upon the Silk Route, or upon all the roads still strewn with unexpected treasures (the road of selfdiscovery?), her work has preceded her. In his book, "La Route Bleue", Kenneth White, the inventor of 'geo-poetics', relates how, as a child, the syllables of the word Labrador used to dance around his head, and how he imagined its own special beauty before he actually discovered its geography. And Novalis reminds us how the true exterior is within us. Beate E. Renner has an affinity with these buccaneering spirits, these real or imaginary travellers. Her work invents - in the sense of an inventory - a desirable reality. There is little hint of Orientalism in her work, yet each canvas recalls her rejection of a homogenous world in which the differences and contradictions are absorbed by the mass of the herd. Instead, there is simply an Orient, an aesthetic Orient in which speed has been abandoned for on-going adventure, straight lines for sinuosity, propicious to images that stem from the inner world. In her work, gestures determine territories which change with the passing hours and years. The titles are there to point to distant lands that whet one's desire of the unknown. And that is perhaps their sole purpose: They indicate nothing but this desire, without which reality would not exist. One of the prominent filibustering figures of contemporary art, Malcolm Morley, said that his aim as a painter was 'to lose himself in reality'. A twofold surprise awaits us in the paintings of Beate E. Renner. They lead us astray so as to draw our gaze away from conventional objects, which are usually laid out before our covetous eyes. And when our gaze is well and truly lost, as in the heart of a luxuriant forest, fragments of reality reconstruct an image, foreign to words, but nevertheless concrete. Our gaze is then ready to change direction: By abandoning the idea of arriving, it can enjoy its stay in the fictional universe of the canvas. In the West's vast capital cities, our eyes have become prisoners sentenced to the consumer's reflex vision, which for the last few years has also encompassed art. They are in need of islands where they may enjoy all the colours of the world.
On their return to Europe after their adventures abroad, the buccaneers brought back sumptuous jewels. The painting of Beate E. Renner will possibly produce similar treasures.
Translated by Pamela Hargreaves.