Frans Krajcberg’s paintings-assemblages proceed from the same approach: to bring back to life the dead. The smallest natural detail that our eye forgets to look at can allow us to reconnect with nature. Different elements gathered in the midst of nature - stones, lianas, corals, leaves, wood… - become full universes that the light or the imperceptible movement of an insect rejuvenates. 

 

Red flowers. 

In the 1960s, in Paris, Frans Krajcberg produced a first series of paintings / assemblages made of sculpted flowers, covered with red natural pigments, color of fire and strength. His approach is closer to reproduction than to reappropriation. His painted flowers give off a violence that associates the force of life - red - with a symbol of death, because for him the flower carries something morbid in it.  ​

 

Assemblage-paintings of natural fragments 

Frans Krajcberg works on his paintings-assemblages, made of natural pieces, by applying an alloy of soil and glue, on sun-dried paper, on which they are redrawn. He can also make simple collages on wooden panels. His “assemblage-paintings” are a scenography of the presented elements,  underlining their natural beauty to develop new forms, new universes, new messages.  ​

 

His first stone paintings show the living and vibrant stone without artifice. Material and color are raw. No work is made from the same stones. He meticulously harvests quartz, granites, amethysts, crystals ... Transparent or opaque, round or pointed, the stones reveal a world of forms, of unequalled colors and unsuspected vibrations. 

 

According to Thérèse Vian, “ Krajcberg’s stone paintings are a silent invitation to endless reverie, a space for reflection that opens up on Nature, on Man, the visible and the invisible. A reverie of solidity, hardness and resistance, which, related to his work, would highlight his painful past, always underlying. This past which never leaves him and which would have made him, in appearance, as hard and as sharp as a stone. This desire to evoke cutting images undoubtedly reveals for the artist the need to operate a real surgical operation which would cut in the deep of this painful past. The stone would therefore have had a liberating role for the artist who no longer has the same need to use it at the end of his life. It will continue to be present in his later works, but no longer in such a prominent way. It will only be an aesthetic element of adornment, which will beautify his burnt trees.” 

 

“My conclusion is that I am poorer than nature because it creates much more than I do. I saw all the shapes that we think we are inventing and we are not inventing anything. I wanted to dominate it. I made paintings with stones in Minas Gerais and I saw that in nature itself they were much more expressive, much more alive than the paintings I had made, so I gave up", Frans Krajcberg.