"Jerusalem Star"
"Jordan Times"

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'lndustrial disease' snares the world of art
 
(Jerusalem Star, September 1986)
 
CLAUS CANINENBERG preaches his own brand of body therapy in a disquieting exhibition of pencil drawings and oil paintings at the Petra Bank Gallery this week.
 
"Does man become or is he already part of a machine?" he asks us and then proceeds to illustrate his answering theory of man as machine from within and without and the ensuing wear and tear of pressure and strain on man's . 'mechanical' anatomy in his art work.
 
One may question if this is art when the painting medium is used as a forum for kalisthenics- for the artistic properties of colour space and line are sacrificed to the diagrammatic expounding of theory.
Claus Caninenberg is a trained mechanical and civil engineer who is employed as a geological engineer at the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources in Hanover and is currently seconded to Jordan. He is a self-taught painter whose glut of ideas find an outlet in the painting medium but who primarily remains an engineer in style down to the inclusion of Egyptian heirogylphics in his works.
 
His art is reminiscent of the 'futurists" of the early part of the century who used 'dynanism' as an expressive means placing an emphasis on process rather than on things. Like the futurists, Claus Caninenberg glorifies the machine and eschews the poetic and the feminine in favour of mechanical beauty.
His love of smooth and totally functional machine parts leads him to reduce the complex body system and existential dilemmas to a series of 'springs' and 'ball bearings' in a purely functional crouching and leaping skeleton with diagrammatic emphasis on internal jointing.
Unlike the futurists whose revolutionary zeal hoped to overthrow the stranglehold of romanticism, Claus Caninenberg is not concerned with industrial liberation but with the pressures of modern day living on man in a mature industrial society.
 
His idea of equating man with machine serve a crude form of utilitarianism. By scientific enquiry through art we are provoked into our own questioning and we are led to draw useful conclusions of how to deal with pressure and overloading.
 
The brutal 'sketchy' paintings poorly coloured and lacking in anatomical precision have none of the remote beauty of the metal machine. Here are recognizable bodies, an array of anonymous legs and arms tortuously and visibly undergoing the gravitational pulling and pushing of everyday body actin.
 
By replacing heads with machine parts and ripping open spinal and chest cavities to reveal the 'nuts and bolts' of the body mechanism, we become aware of the power of the forces around us and the resilience and resistance and the vulnerability of the body they are acting upon. The warnings of constant pressure without relief and the monotony of a clockwork existence are all too clear.
 
The general tone of the exhibition is instructive rather than aesthetic and it is arguable if didacticism has a home in the twentieth century art gallery.
 
(by Vanessa Patrouni)
 
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(Jordan Times, 25./26. September 1986)
 
The working mechanics of man under strain
 
Amman- The exhibition of by Claus Caninenberg, now he Petra Bank Art Gallery, are not the kind of paintings you can nip in for a quick look. The black and white studies and the oils developed from them are arresting, thought provoking images that demand attention and prolonged study. Carefully and subtly rendered, Caninenberg's figures X-rayed to reveal not bones and sinews but nuts and bolts, are symbols for the problems faced by people all over the world, the positions of the figures and the intricate details that surround them posing many questions while only answering a few.
 
Caninenberg, a German-born mechanical and civil engineer seconded to Jordan as a technical aid expert, is a self-taught artist who uses his ability to express the ideas that bubble up out of him like an insuppressible fountain. He wants his paintings to make people think, to give them a deeper understanding of themselves and of what is happening around them and so intense is his desire to inspire and stimulate his audience into asking questions that one gets the feeling that the fact that many of his works are very aesthetically pleasing, is purely incidental.
 
Functional parts
 
Caninenberg's affection for smooth, totally functional machine parts has led him to sec us in terms of them, imbibing us with their qualities, using them to show what effect our surroundings have on us and how we should, and can, deal with the pressures each of us faces daily. Mostly Caninenberg visualises us as springs and depicts his figures bent over, Eke coils in cross-section, able to give and take power. Like springs, however, we break under too much pressure but Caninenberg offers us two alternatives - a vent to release the excess pressure or a connection with another spring with whom to share the load. This, in very simplistic terms, is the theme of several of Caninenberg's works although his paintings are very much more complex with 1ayers of more subtle inferences being derivable from them.
 
Movement
 
As well as the spring, another part Caninenberg favours is a double wheel whose internal ball bearings allow it to move freely wile being fixed in position. Symbolising the fact that we should have our roots while being able to go where we will, Caninenberg has based one of the most appealing works on this idea, with two man/machines freely flying around each other.
To help us visualise more clearly what some of the paintings are about, the artist has actually constructed a machine with springs and weights. Based on this, one then understands the ideas Caninenberg is trying to express on suppression, on hope and hopelessness and on the power to be gained from pooling resources.
 
Black and white studies
 
Half of the exhibition is given over to the black and white studies Caninenberg first makes to formalise his ideas. Although often carefully drawn and scrupulously and economically worked out so that every object in the drawing has a meaning, they are sometimes angry and volatile, ferociously denouncing inhumanity, manipulation and the limitations imposed on the freedom of the individual. The drawings are littered with equations of letters and numbers which, although indecipherable to Most of us are the hierogyphics of the ancient Egyptians, give the mechanical engineers among Caninenberg's audience the advantage of understanding his work much more readily.
The oil paintings are subtle distillations of these drawings but where the latter are often pessimistic and sometimes wild and aggressive, the oils are generally optimistic, calm and serene and a fuller understanding of Caninenberg's work is reached when both study and oil are sec together. Further than that, the contrasting qualities lend an extra depth and cohesion to the show a whole.
The exhibition runs unto September 30th.
 
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