Children have the Proms. Grown-ups head to Salzburg. Igor Toronyi-Lalic on Anselm Kiefer's Mein Rhein

Igor Levit and Teodor Currentzis were on fire at this year's uncompromising and often exhilarating Salzburg Festival. Plus: Anselm Kiefer close-up. 

[…]

Thanks to Salzburg gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac, the visual arts always put on a decent showing during festival season. At his Mirabellplatz site, I parked my nose a few centimetres from Anselm Kiefer’s new canvases. You can do this in a private gallery. They trust you. Step into one of these billionaire showrooms and you cease to be a member of the public. You’re presumed at once to be a connoisseur.

Art theorist Maurice Merleau-Ponty believed there was an optimal distance from which to view every painting. Inspecting Kiefer’s 13 new oils it struck me that I had found the ideal position: within licking distance. Move back any further and one quickly became mugged by sentiment and association. They became mere pictures back here: legible visions of Kiefer’s memories of the murky green Rhine as a child, the banks lined with bowed trees, the sky crowned by blinding sunsets. Pretty, generalised, genteel and second-hand. A hint of Klimt, a nod to Monet, a wink to Watteau. ‘Anselm fuit hic’, it says, graffitied at the top of many of them. ‘Anselm was here’: viewed from the middle distance the paintings are all past tense.

Bury your face in the works, however, and the present tense of the paint wildly working itself out over the canvas returns. Here, amid the linseed oil fumes, every violent eddy and gyration becomes tangible, every ocean floor scar a mini thriller.

Follow the Kiefer hand as he conjures up whorls, boils and blisters. Allow yourself to be ensnared by the fiery licks, claggy swamps – thick as cupcake icing – and cracked mud. And look at that sticky green-black stalactite of oil paint slowly making its way to the floor. The microscopic allows for no gentility. No nostalgic revisionism. Even the gold-leaf sunbursts sting up close. There was no oasis down here from which to reflect, just endless fire. Not pretty, not fun – but all the more exciting as art.