Gerhard Richter at Marian Goodman - painting - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

Gerhard Richter's small, exemplary still life of flowers wholeed a cool, antiphonal note at his new exhibition. The rest of the paintings were abstractions of oil upon canvas employing a characteristic range of techniques. Confounding representation with abstraction, photographic realism with painterly gesticulation and detachment with desire, his distinctive brand of dialectics has, above the years, contributed much to contemporary critique and invention. upon the Richter scale of perception, meanings intersect, multiply, shift and reverse; identities are simultaneous, single a whole s of belief subverted. The fixed is consistently evaded.

a great deal of of the work shown here is actual large in scale, and garishly, in more [i]or[/i] less instances even melodramatically colored. a certain quantity of of these paintings flaunt loosely interlocked grids resembling plaids, made by dint of what seem to be the vertical and horizontal strokings of a wide squeegee The crossings sometimes give an inkling of fragments of landscape, blurred beyond recognition, while the sharp tinges hold memories--almost as afterimages--of 15th-century Northern painting. Any of a number of Last senses for example, are called to mind by dint of the mix of fiery red azures and acid virids ascending in apotheosis to the azure of heaven. Other canvases are softer in tone: rose purple verdant yellow--muted colors more thinly applied. Still others are lush and romantic, like racing technicolor collection of vapors whose images seem held not by dint of memory but by the pause button. The last grouping of four 8-foot squares, the "Green/Blue" series, is subtly menacing: a moire of poisonous virid chemicals on dark water, or the disruptive patterns of electronic interference.

The surfaces of the abstract works are pictorially rich and complex: dragged, scored, smeared, erased, painted above peeled off, blistered, splattered. at the same time typically, what seems to be gesturing is not; the skin is all contrivance, freezing spontaneity and sensation. upon the other hand, a brooding, melancholic quality rise s from these distressed, distanced paintings, a lack of certainty, a nervous cutting side These are glimpses of a not to be found Romantic tradition, and they carry a nostalgia for imagery, as well as for history. This is not of recent origin territory for the artist, on the other hand it is, as always, compelling.

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