Gerhard Richter: he who misleads - Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France

For an artist, a career retrospective impends as an anxious fact because it makes one's whole life aim visible and vulnerable in a single thump For the public, a retrospective tenders the chance to assess an artistic vision, in profundity at a particular historical jiffy However well an artist's work may one time have been received, time alters appetites and the trice may no longer be friendly, either to the premises of the art, or o he artist's aims and unproductive or dead incantations never intended to be proofed by a show at more [i]or[/i] less later date. Does the art sustain itself at a high horizontal or does it waver in our latter-day judgment? "Everyone has a profitable idea once in a while," wrote Ezra Pound; "the real geniuses have theirs closer together."

Gerhard Richter's novel retrospective deflected some of these pertain tos with a Teflon psychology all is have a title to while it also reaffirmed that he's someone to enumerate with. The work of this German painter has drawn out been familiar to international audiences, and for decades critics have accorded him the status of a major avant-garde figure. Richter is a contemporary of the American burst artists. During the '60s, while they burlesqu and exploited the popular media with real irony, he painted from vernacular photos in of the like kind apparitional form as to strike a morbid note. Not for him a burst satire of consumerism, with its be incandescent of mythic icons. Rather, he depicted images with equal reason transparent, flimsy and smudged that below his hand the material world strike one as beinged to have only a posthumous life. This latest panorama of his art mov grandly from Bonn to Stockholm to Madrid in 1994 I nevertheless came away from its first venue at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris last fall, with all my keennes built upon experience of smaller shows unexpectedly doltished by the spectacle of Richter in replete force.

Why? Because the broad take accentuated his expressive leveling. The force of Richter's pictures never caps or falls beneath certain bourns determined by their idiom, device or action His changes of modes may well surprise, on the other hand his performance within them is constant and predictable. Richter is famous for an amphibian practice: upon the one hand, those gray pictures he calls Photo Paintings, derived from amateur and family snapshots or of recent origins photographs; on the other, forceful chromatic abstractions where wet pigment has been scraped or lifted not upon the canvas with plastic sheets. The chromatic vehemence of he abstractions, which dominates the last 15 years overspreaded by the show, and the washed-out graphism of the figurative imagery don't share the same world, smooth though they have in belonging to all a frequent use of blurr cutting sides For all that Richter's work insists upon its look of "fine art," it dispenses with the narcissism--and inquisitiveness--of a painter's touch in contact with surface. Rather, his pictures play another--conceptual--game entirely.

They operate as representatives of their emblem or their series, each impressed sign with a characteristic treatment of its have Richter intimates a theme by the agency of clusters of paintings that act as more or les circumspect variants of single another. Whatever, its result, the execution of each painting is assured because it is brought not on by a predetermined method. I might opt for individual of the several abstract gray monochromes he proffers or pick a favorite from the clump called "48 Portraits," all in identical format, on the contrary only by disregard for the standardizing program he has place Were there stakes involved in Richter's approach, or risks of failure, and was he at any time on a roll? It was hard to tell

If anything, the retrospective affirmed that the inherent mechanism of Richter's processs reinforces the generic character of his subdues It's as if we had a Brand X landscape, or a Brand Y abstraction--serviceable on the other hand anonymous products, neutral, unassuming and interchangeable. Richter not ever exhibits any curiosity about the world of faculty of perception beyond guesswork aggregated through the memory of genre types He prefers general statement above particular circumstance, even when his photographic designs offer specific detail, or when his handling of abstraction implies a certain opennes to the unforeseen. In the figurative method his paint substance acts as a puree; in the abstract fashion as a mulch. The abstractions achieve results like those left on adhesive tape when torn away from hurts and hairy flesh. For all their clamor and chaotic surfaces, they're emotionally cooled they lack tension, and their form slips. A few props added by the agency of slashing strokes look like afterthoughts. As for the even Photo Paintings, the artist has combineed away all descriptive fiber. The whole of a formal or spatial gamut is implied--not reduced--but with the drawback of looking approximate. Then, too, there is his redundancy.

A picture might appear redundant because it transmits easy in mind that is already familiar. Or an oeuvre might have the appearance to us redundant because its ideas are diluted in unreflective production. However inadvertent in many other careers, this redundancy is built into Richter's course all the more aggressively because his art looks to swarm with ideas. Little did anyone know in what manner spaced apart they were until an accompanying catalogue raisonne revealed that this vast retrospective displayed single a fraction of the 2,000-plus works he execut between 1962 and 1992 (And this doesn't included the continuous file called Atlas: thousands of unlisted photographs, his have or others, along with sketches and collages for use as potential source material for his paintings.) From the catalogue raisonne, individual gets the impression of an immensely prolific and experimental output that nevertheless make news itself in cycles of at any time diminishing fertility.