sehrgut.dearchiv: berlin 1998
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When Daniel Richter’s paintings were shown in Hamburg for the first time, it was alleged that a swarm of birds had digested its own brilliant plumage and deposited it in the form of colorful filth onto the canvas. This spillage, however, aware of its own materiality, was only a beginner’s drug, the laying of a bet in which the painting was to be pushed to a maximum superfluity of color and paint, a condition which has, in the meantime, become aware of its own conditions.No instance of method, no means emerges as a dominating factor or a shorter way to an end result – and despite this having decided upon the longer path, the paintings do not collapse into the painting process. The densely applied colors retain their clarity in the midst of all evidence towards a laborious fiddling around; they accumulate to form an intense brightness of color in pictorial space. The first and best sign of these paintings is their presence, an insistence which overshadows all explanations, all understanding and recognition. 
Through the method, as well as through the most obvious indications of influences by other painters, they present themselves as proof of their own wager – and to this extent they are an answer to a question which nobody has posed. During the course of his experimentation with styles of painting, Daniel Richter has slowed down the painting process more or less to a crawl, reduced it to the viscous and troublesome or greasy, amusing form of movement inherent in the matter coming out of the tube. A web of material allusions has since accompanied the transport of light through color: passages which can be traced back to the very first steps attempted in the material. Here, it’s not only about blue, brown, yellow – it’s also about fluid, dull, squashed or warped – and the uncertainty in meaning, the degree of abstraction is precisely calculated.
For this reason, the representational moments can no longer be clearly located in the triangular order of approaches to form, color and matter. Patterns of drips, wave rings, knots, splatters, sky blue, the flicker of some sort of comic strip-like astonishment, a paintstroke as painted stroke, color fields with post and lintel – all of these are modifications of time, of passage, the undefinably long moment of an attempt which runs ahead of its delineation.
The painting process is an unfinished interval of attention, like a glance which sits, shows itself, observes the duration of its own movement and then disappears at the endpoint of a modulation of velocity. For this reason, one cannot precisely determine where it occurs, even when a painting has been finished. Here, in the same way as beauty, nature first becomes a referent when the opposite is retained as well, or when the submergence in a utopian landscape of civilization has entirely drowned out the idea of nature. Only then does nature return as an example of superfluity and intensity, as a result of experience, which scatters details, infinity, amazement and memory about itself, all at the same time.The paintings of Daniel Richter cannot be perceived quickly, because they relegate the gaze to an intermediate space in which it receives no assistance, a space between recognition and lack of understanding. The gaze is continually being led towards comprehension and yet is kept far away from it, already finding itself there where it was only just constituted. There is no detour and no handbook for this path. One can, however, also regard the lack of explanation and the unpredictable brightnesses of this insistent materialism as a respite or as time. For this, one only has to simply look at the paintings. 
Daniel Richter > Scholarship and Prices: Solo exhibitions (Selection) Group exhibitions (Selection) Otto-Dix-Preis, Kunstsammlung Gera, Gera Basel (CH)* Punch In Out, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg* Malerei III, 1996, Galerie Monika Sprüth, Köln Scharfer Blick, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn* [Back to top] [Gunda Förster] [Hans Hemmert] [Sabine Hornig] [York der Knöfel] [Michel Majerus] [Antje Majewski] [Olaf Nicolai] [Manfred Pernice] [Daniel Richter] |
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