On Painting

Gerhard Richter's Claudius is one of the largest and most overwhelming of his colourful Abstract Paintings. Dating from 1986, this picture towers over the viewer at a height of over ten feet, absorbing us, swallowing us into a vast and turbulent universe of colour.The painter himself has covered the surface in a variety of strokes that appear to have been applied with a range of objects, from small brushes to squeegees and other solid objects dragged across the canvas. The oils have slowly accreted: Claudius bears the traces of the various stages of its execution as flashes of colour and old brushstrokes peek through. The range of colours, with the flame-like warmth of the yellows and reds contrasting with the darker dominant areas, makes the painting appear like a battle between darkness and light, a struggle whose epic nature is augmented by the vast scale of the arena on which it is being played out. Perhaps that epic content is reinforced by the title itself, the name of the fourth Roman Emperor, adding a strange narrative dimension to the painting which is possibly linked to the fact that it was Claudius who granted Richter’s adopted home, Cologne, city status as a tribute to his Empress Agrippina, who had been born there. It was Claudius who gave Cologne the title COLONIA CLAUDIA ARA AGRIPPINENSIUM, from which it derives its name.

Richter had first come to international attention in the 1960s with his Photo Paintings, in which he had taken deliberately banal snapshots and news images as his sources and rendered them in deadpan oils. In an era when the conceptual was dominant, the idea of painting had been devalued by many critics and artists alike. Richter had sought a way of continuing to paint – it was, after all, the vocation he had learned as an art student in East Germany – and yet of retaining an intellectual distance from what was increasingly considered an obsolete act. In his Photo Paintings, the subjects sometimes appeared arbitrary, as though they were mere springboards for Richter, excuses for him to go through the motions while keeping such old-fashioned notions as authorship and inspiration in check. This was not an entirely cynical process for Richter: he was pointing towards some of the problems posed by painting and by its lack of a role in the modern world, and was at the same time finding a new means of keeping painting alive.

Richter's Abstract Paintings tackle the same territory, but from almost the opposite angle. The arbitrary notion of the subject has been completely removed, freeing the act of painting from its former fetters. Claudius appears to be the product of painting for painting’s sake, albeit while revealing Richter’s own colourism, hinting at his enjoyment of the process of the picture’s execution. However, Richter puts safeguards in place in order to be able to retain the necessary emotional distance from his paintings, to be able to avoid devaluing them by anchoring them too openly to his experiences or even his taste. Aware of the pitfalls of autobiographical content and the physical and emotional exertions of Action Painting – in short, of becoming too involved in the painting – Richter developed a system by which he works on several Abstracts at the same time, comparing himself to a chess expert playing several games concurrently. Each time he sees the paintings anew, they suggest new moves to him, in some sense dictating their own evolutions, coming into existence through some autonomous, internal force as well as through Richter's own interventions. Richter moves from canvas to canvas, sometimes leaving each one for days at a time, in order to be able to return to it with fresh eyes and add, correct or remove any elements that he should deign necessary, constantly editing the appearance of the works so that they avoid any sense of the openly figurative or associative.

It is in the deliberate lack of figurative elements that Richter’s Abstracts gain some of their visual potency. Claudius is a vast zone of infinite potential, of possible interpretation, of shifting shapes and colours that veer towards our understanding and then remain tantalisingly elusive, eternally abstract.The surface is therefore active, almost alive, with quarter-formed associations, resulting in a painting that is constantly stimulating its viewers. In a picture with a visible "subject," the eye stops questioning the painting after that moment of recognition which has succeeded the initial confrontation. In Claudius, that process of confrontation, investigation and interrogation carries on ad infinitum as the viewer faces this bewildering maelstrom of shapes and colours. Richter has managed to isolate the processes both of painting a picture and of looking at one. At the same time,he has ensured that Claudius, which developed step by step as though driven by an internal life and logic of its own, continues to evolve and change, albeit in the subjective realm of our own interpretations. This lack of the traditional hook of a figurative motif – which chimes so perfectly with Richter’s inherent distrust of systems and ideologies having lived through Nazism, Socialism and Capitalism – encapsulates the chaos of existence in our more secular Post-War age.That simple reliance on a central subject has been removed, just as the traditional Western belief in God has waned in our more secular age; Claudius is thus a microcosm in which Richter has exposed the turbulence of existence and the force of nature on a grand and enthusiastic, anarchic scale.

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