Wild brushstrokes and erotically charged scenes cast a spell over the audience. Rainer Fetting plays out role models in his pictures with great immediacy. Alongside the 'big city natives', it is repeatedly the artist's myths that he addresses in self- or figure portraits. Questioning his position in society and his identity are always at the center of his art. And this is also how Fetting painted his naked, muscular models, such as Desmond: provocative, monstrous and jumping out at the viewer.

"Desmond had a scholarship as a ballet dancer. With his toned and athletic body, he was, of course, the perfect model, almost like a sculpture himself. His own understanding of the body exerted an important influence on my work. Our relationship, which continues to this day, has not been without tension, probably because of our contrasting characters and age difference, the difficult role of painter and model and our different cultural backgrounds. [..] Since the oppression of black people and racism still affect our society today, it is not necessarily easy, especially for me as a German and 'white man', to paint a picture with Desmond or make a sculpture of him in an unbiased and naive way. But that actually applies to all my works. Portraits of others, even if you recognize the people in them, always have to do with the artist's own concerns, they are always a kind of self-expression. [..] Desmond knew many artists and was portrayed by some of them, including Basquiat, Haring, Fischl, Mapplethorpe, Salomé and Andy Warhol. [..] Also the relationship with Desmond, who was there somewhere, but then again not at all, suddenly gone like the wind," Rainer Fetting told Heinz Stahlhut in an interview. (in: Fetting, Cologne, 2009, p. 204)

Then as now, there is no doubt: these paintings are about a powerful attitude towards life, glowing, full of restlessness and energy. And it is about the confession of a painter who draws on painterly traditions in order to reinvent his own present in every picture. For the most part, Rainer Fetting does not recount art historical anecdotes in his paintings, even if Desmond lies not so much on, but rather in a Bassin aux Nymphéas, a water lily pond reminiscent of Claude Monet, and Fetting's theme in this case is painting itself: the immense sensuality of color in a light-flooded energy field of gestural brushstrokes: fast, fierce and yet precise. (MvL)