By Alice van Buren, writer
Beate Renner had a dare in her eye the night we met - at a dinner for someone who was making a movie in Uzbekistan.
Usbekistan is fun to say when you are sober. And in Paris we say n 'importe quoi when we are drunk. By the end of the night, we were plotting a raid: I'd hold the horses and she'd man the guns.
Toasts were made to the Uzbeki campaign.
But first, she said, we must take Berlin.
We'd hire a truck and load it with the frigate's worth of canvas stacked in her hall. Drive twelve hours north on the autobahn. And hang her paintings, hoist them like sails, and everybody would come and look, and carry on the way we do in the West. And if it came off, we might try our luck in Uzbekistan.
All I had to do was write a few words to go with the show.
So I went over to her place one afternoon, and she hauled out her canvases, yard upon yard. It was like being in the middle of the ocean with too much sun. I felt I need of a compass. A sextant. A glass of water. A hat.
I said I lacked the equipment to write about this. All I could see was a terrible emergency. I tried to bail out.
Nothing doing.
I went home and worried about all that water and all that sun and all that paint. Terra Voluptatis - the theme of this show - seemed a long way away, about as far out on the planet as Uzbekistan.
Terra Voluptatis, to the Spanish, meant the New World. It was the gorgeous frontier. It was Atlantis or Eden - with silver shores and rivers of gold - a glittering dream on the horizon when they set sail out of Lisbon with the setting sun in their eyes. A vision more reckless than holy, it lured them across the Atlantic for months that turned into hell in those breezeless belts along the equator where the sea shines like glass and the sun boils your brains, and the waves suck and squirm around a paralyzed hull full of horses and men half-crazed from thirst.
Mermaid territory. Sea of weeds. Miles of kelp, no land in sight. Down in the hold, the water kegs drip for Andalusian horses granted by princes and blessed by popes. The where-with-all to scare the natives silly, when you disembark like a god on six legs. Sacred horses, in other words. Weighing half a ton each, drinking and sweating, pissing whole gallons the color of gold.
Figure the odds on a hot windless day that has lasted two weeks. Factor the cargo, the loadline, the thin and perishable breeze. Count the last kegs of water, chart the miles still to go. And take a look at your men, licking their knives and chewing on hemp.
Delirium, fights, Ave Marias on deck. Horses steaming in the hold. And 10 000 feet of sharkinfested sea below.
As for Terra Voluptatis, Firma, Incognita, and all the rest: A blinding wink on the horizon.
Beate Renner paints like a pirate. She will get to her silver shores, no doubt. Like the Atlantic crossings of the conquistadores, her work is tropical, huge, reckless and squandered. You see the paint that hit the floor, the ideas crossed out, the horses driven overboard. You hear the shouts, the squeals, the thud of hooves on wood, the halfton splash. And then you feel the breeze.
If you get to Terra Voluptatis, you will get there disinvested. You will have to cross those windless dumping grounds called the Horse Latitudes.
Once these pictures reach Berlin, they will have land miles on top of the sea miles. Framed and hung, they may look slightly less drastic. But stacked around some rooms here in Paris, they looked like a stampede on deck.
It made me think twice about the Uzbeki campaign. Spare the horses: let's do it on foot.