Brooklyn Rail : Gerhard Richter: Endgadin (by Patricia Lewy)

Gerhard Richter, Silsersee, Maloja (Lake Sils, Maloja), 1992. Oil on color photograph, 3 7/8 x 5 7/8 inches. © Gerhard Richter 2023. Private Collection, Switzerland. Photo: Jon Etter.

Gerhard Richter: Endgadin at Hauser & Wirth, St. Moritz, documents Richter’s ongoing fascination with the Swiss Alpine Engadin surrounding the village of Sils Maria and the Fex Valley (Val Fex) in more than sixty overpainted photographs (Übermalungen), together with paintings and works on paper, drawn from a quarter century (1989–2018) of repeated visits to the region. Supplemented by complementary exhibitions at the Segantini Museum (St. Moritz) and the Nietzsche-Haus (Sil Maria), this show reveals how Richter mines the pictorial possibilities offered by overlaying abstract gestural swipes, drips, and smears on small format, commercially developed snapshots of the region. Ultimately, what might appear as transgressive acts of defacement transform private memories into indelible public revelations. The story goes that while scaling up a photograph in oil paint on canvas, a splatter of paint unexpectedly landed on the source image. Liking the result, Richter began exploring the aesthetic disjunction between impasto and light image: paint’s corporeality disrupts the continuous flat surface of the photograph and creates, to stunning effect, an exquisite détente between the mediums. 

One enters the gallery on its ground floor, where subdued lighting suggests a sense of liminal space. Guided by reflections from the lateral procession of white frames, matting, and glass enclosures that line the walls at eye level, one tentatively approaches these reliquary-like containers, their concentric framing edges progressing from outer frame to beveled matte to small-scale photographic inset. Peering in, one is rocked by a sudden aporia, as if vision were at an impasse, blocked by dispersals of oil paint as swipes, scrapes, and smatterings shower palpable directional force. The vastness of the natural world—towering mountains, limitless sky, effulgent light—has been relegated to a supporting role as the substrate for teeming chromatic movement. Impasto is writ large, while the ostensible subject, landscape, has been subjected to a kind of misprision of representation, concealed beneath whorls of matter. This reversal of scale causes a prising open of flatness, as in 7.4.08, where glyphs of mixed hues in the foreground obscure what appears to be a massive, luminous cloud plume hovering over a mountainscape. The viewing experience, as topologies shift between oil bas relief and glossy surface, is both baffling and freeing, suspending us between the compulsion to identify, to name—a mountain, a corner of a building, a human figure—and the sheer pleasure of release from certainty. 

Gerhard Richter, Val Fex, 1992. Oil on color photograph, 3 7/8 x 6 inches. © Gerhard Richter 2023. Private Collection, Switzerland. Photo: Jon Etter.

Richter’s straight photography renders the subject immobile and distant, while his overlayed paint matter reanimates the surface through a semblance of gestural expressivity. The artifactual—the remnant of a past vista—is joined to the remains or excesses of a prior painterly act. The artist’s treatments range from accidental drips onto a photograph to intentional wiping of the photograph across the squeegee blade. For example, yellow and ochre hues limn Piz Lagrev, 1992 (Piz, Romansh for peak), Richter’s snapshot of a summit comprised of several pyramidal outcroppings at 3165 meters (10, 383 feet). This overlay of chromatic “terrain” was brought about by pressing the photograph onto the flat blade of a squeegee still wet with oil paint. As Richter released it from the paint’s viscous grasp, contiguous ovoid ridges appear on the surface, each surrounding a hollowed-out cavity, forming an opaque veil made from skeins of rivulets in bas relief. Or take 12.1.89, where a technicolor weather storm asserts its presence in the foreground, the swirling effect made by pressing and pulling the image diagonally against a blade loaded with residual scrapings of yellow, green, and red-orange. The magnificent solar flares of Silsersee, Maloja (Lake Sils, Maloja) (1992) also arise from this pressing and pulling action. Here, the gesture seems magnificent—a monumental eruption skyward that dwarfs the scale of the mountains surrounding Lake Sils. A vista over the Val Fex is treated in a larger format turned vertically: Richter has placed the photograph on the edge of the blade and pulled the photographic paper downward, leaving not only a directional trace, but also a thickened horizontal residue of paint made by the edge of the blade, laden with grays. The motif of the green valley and lake surrounded by evergreens is compressed by the scrim of gray, dotted with potholes that randomly open onto the paper surface. In Richter’s hands the palette knife effects scrims and streaks—scraping layers of impasto to achieve an allover gauze in various hues, as we see in 12.3.92, or smearing aerial views of the Fex Valley with luxuriant swipes of thickened oil paint (Val Fex, 1992). A change of medium from oil to lacquer in works such as Val Fedoz, Muott’Ota, 1992, effects a floating, lustrous, transparent dome within which black and white spread, yet remain distinct.

Richter stages two kinds of distinctive realities, a hybrid form whose disjunctions are never resolved. What Richter referred to early on in another context as a “documentary actuality,” the photograph, here disputes with obdurate matter.1 These works strike one as a performance of difference, of oppositions, of contrast and contest, of resistance. The viewer’s attention is trained on the distinctness in facture of an image divided: on the one hand light and chemical capture, on the other, impastoed paint. Richter refuses paint its historic role in representation, replacing it with aleatory accidents that suggest spatial displacement and erasure.

Installation view: Gerhard Richter: Engadin, Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz, 2023–24 © 2023 Gerhard Richter (09122023). Photo: Jon Etter.

Yet, as much as one assumes chance operations in Richter’s process, he does not relinquish control. Rather, Richter asserts an authority over these works—an intention, if you will—through several actions: the choice of photograph, the technique of paint application, the placement of paint relative to the motif, the placement relative to the blade, the amount of pressure against the paint applied by the arm, which colors he will pair, and whether he will stack multiple colors or a single hue. And while the final renderings are beyond his complete control, they are not unanticipated. Richter accepts or rejects each on the basis of an a priori aesthetic program.

The program—a disjunction between scene and overpainting—defeats narrative sequence and defies causal logic. Yet each work radiates inexpressible beauty. How does Richter bring this about? He has no answers: we are on our own, relying on imaginative sensemaking and sensorial responses. What we do know is that the works gathered here stimulate a kind of psychic and empathic ideation, a projection of feelings and memories associated with the traces of swiped and pressed paint that occlude Richter’s miniaturized vistas. How to account for the sudden clenching of the chest that leaves one breathless, awed by childhood memories of looking through raindrops sliding at various speeds down a windowpane. Feeling both exhilaration and an awareness of loss, I am left simultaneously overawed and bereft by Richter’s chromatic shapes, as they form rhymes, dissolve, and toggle contrapuntally with and against the site of the image. Aside from their sheer beauty, these works stun us because they retrieve and reassemble our own fragmented memories, here recuperated within this procession of shallow frames.

Article published on https://brooklynrail.org