Gerhard Richter’s contribution to Documenta 7 was a series of bold abstract paintings in which brilliant, often acidic tones, frenetic brushstrokes, and illusions of receding space limned the dictionary of Expressionistic gestures. As arranged through the exhibition according to the installation principle of “conversations,” they seemed to be used to reinforce the pressure to paint so prominently featured in the show. But this was a distortion of Richter’s premises, which consist in a thorough demystification of the activity of painting and of its pretensions to creativity—a separation of brushstroke from the fetishism of the hand, of gesture from illusions of expression, and of space from any imposed equation with the theater of the self. This recent New York exhibition vindicated those preoccupations.
Over the past twenty years Richter has employed a range of established styles, subjects, and techniques so as to play on and deconstruct conventions. Here he juxtaposed two disparate styles, one “pictorial,” the other “photographic,” one expressive, the other realistic, so as to expose painting as a neutral activity, neither expressing the self nor reproducing an existing real. The abstract paintings are the ones exhibited at Documenta; all nine are large rectangular canvases, several of which play with the diptych convention. They appear, as Richter has said, to be made “according to a recipe,” each yielding a different variation on emotional gesture and evocative hue. Slashing brushstrokes are deployed helter-skelter to weave a fabric of illusionistic space. The strokes vary in rhythm: there are broad, heavy swaths and spiky, jetlike thrusts. And they vary in configuration: Richter will use a wide hook of orange to build an arch of space into depth, or mass layers of paint or elements of composition into corners or foreground regions. Just as he reproduces the whole arsenal of techniques, so the colors are cacophonous, ranging from red to pink to yellow to chartreuse to blue and bilious black. But more significantly they are varied in their associations, moving from aquamarine and celestial blues to earthy reds and browns, from portentous black and ocher to sun yellow and jubilant pink. All this in a deeply illusioned space, which denotes nothing yet seems omnifarious in its connotations, according to how the viewer reads the different conventions. By accentuating the neutrality of painting (for these are all formulaic works, produced through a sequence of technical operations), Richter reveals the production of a “subject” for painting as a function of the play of the spectator’s imagination.
The counterpart to these works is a series of four paintings whose subjects resemble photographed candles. The notion of “resemblance” is central, for in keeping with Richter’s desire to simulate photographic objectivity (“It is not a question of imitating a photograph. I want to make a photograph,” he has said, referring to a technical production model), what initially appears to be a painting is actually a pictorial composition. The presentations of single, double, and triple lighted candles, placed close to the viewer and “shot” against gray-green interior backgrounds, are undoubtedly made according to Richter’s recipe technique of photo-slide projection; they approach the photograph’s styleless, “imagistic” look. Yet they differ from photorealism in that they are actually pictorial compositions—rectilinear arrangements of gray, brown, white, and yellow strokes, often graded into exquisite penumbrae, into which the viewer projects readings according to the decoding of visual conventions. The spirituality symbolically associated with light is revealed as a similar projection, for these paintings are made through the most material of practices, by stroke laid by stroke laid by stroke. In his juxtaposition of two contradictory styles Richter unmasks painting as a null and nugatory activity, providing a salutary counter to recent, false, expressionist rhetoric; however, in indicating the extent to which the viewer produces the referent, he ventures on more ambitious theoretical terrain.
—Kate Linker
