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In 1984, while in full artistic ascent, G. Richter warns critics, collectors
and art historians: "My paintings have no content or meaning."
His warning reminds one Nerval addressed Alexandre Dumas: "my sonnets are as obscure as the Metaphysics
of Hegel or the Memorables of Swedenborg, and they lose their charm to be explained,
if it were possible." The both insist on the ambiguity of their
plastic and poetic work. The perseverance can explain "les Chimères" and a certain
look is able to understand the Richter's polymorphic creation, subtended by a reflection upon the
Time in general and History in particular.
Recall that the man has seen many vicissitudes : born in Dresden in 1932, an uncle in the
Wehrmacht and a schizophrenic aunt exterminated, Richter survived Nazism and bombings of his
hometown; teenager in a ruined and divided country, he joined the Communist Party of
East Germany in 1950; student at the Fine-Arts in full wave of socialist realism, he is tempted
by abstraction and passed to the West in 1961, a year before the construction of the "the
Iron Curtain"; finally, successful artist and professor in Germany and the United States,
he boarded a flight to New York on the morning of September 11, 2001! A turbulent life
Therefore, at every stage of his work (minimalist
photographic, hyper realistic or abstract), he asks: "What can art relative to personal
destiny, to totalitarianism, to terrorism?
Let us see what are the visual translations of this quest.
At the Contemporary Art Institute of Villeurbanne,
it may take the form of a surprising object, entitled Ubersicht or Overview (1998). A priori,
by far, the work is confusing, difficult to identify: is it an electronic document, a
geographical map? Closely, we understand that we are In front of a very personal history
of art; an history of art in the form of synoptic table, computer-assisted; where names of artists,
architects and poets correspond to dates from 1300 to 1950, the Richter's name figures prominently
because he is aware of belonging to the great Western cultural tradition. He paints an Annunciation
after Titian, he uses the projector as Vermeer used the "camera obscura" to direct the light
and to give a porcelain complexion to his models, he shares with Philippe de Champaigne
taste for minimalist vanities (candle turned on or skull overturned with genius); like
Caspar David Friedrich, he loves the characters seen from behind, like Monet, he likes the
play of reflections, like ***, he loves the randomness gesture; as Duchamp and Warhol,
he loves photography. Richter refuses the probable disappearance
of the painting in front the rise of video and installations and is working to renew
the images. He inventes the photographic painting and
blurring to renew the portrait, still life and landscapes, he collaborates with the random
to renew abstract.
Richter continually adding to his Atlas, impressive collection of press photos, family or lovers
who is willingly exposed but is also one of the sources
of his pictorial work. He borrows from the photograph black and white,
close-up and blurring: he tries different experiments to fusion two arts: sometimes
he paints from photographs, sometimes he paints as one photographes, sometimes he paints on
photos; these techniques are creating hybrid objects and make the images of violence (war, terrorist attacks) easier
to watch than the documentary photographs; but mostly these experiments show how it is
futile to try to represent reality, how painting and reality are different.\
Aware of the limits of representation, Richter can switch to Abstraction and
try to translate the invisible.\ This gives the sublime part of the work done
with amazing textures and colors like never modulated. How does it do this? He chooses
the format, the color, the thickness of layers, the direction of the gesture, and randomness
does the rest: Indeed, Richter works by layers of primary and secondary colors, that spreads
with several spatulas, that smoothes in all directions and crushes until an unexpected
image, often close to a shimmer of water. \b This work questions the essence of painting,
and most of the paintings have the same name Abstraktes Bild or "abstract painting", and
have no meaning.\ \
Unclassifiable artist, Richter simultaneously queries the traumatic moments in History and
nature images that account for the violence of emotional shock. He invented a visual ambiguity
which corresponds to the ambiguity of History and Autobiography, more subjective than objective.\
His work is less disparate than it seems and we understand why it requires exhibition commissioners
an hooking side by side figurative paintings and abstract paintings.\
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