Gerhard Richter Painting: The mystery, simplicity and fascination are there in the title
Richter Scale
by Laura Hutson
"To talk about painting is not only difficult, but perhaps pointless, too," says a young Gerhard Richter in a video from 1965. Painting is not verbal but visual communication, Richter says, and putting words around the ideas a painting expresses can only really work if the work is simple.
But Richter's work is not simple. That's why Corinna Belz's documentary Gerhard Richter Painting is so successful — it offers a little exposition from the artist, his assistants and various gallery directors and art historians, but that's always secondary. The vérité-style filmmaking ensures that the focus is always on what the title names as the movie's subject: Gerhard Richter painting.
Richter is one of the world's greatest living painters. The film documents his studio practice as he creates two large-scale abstracts at once, starting with yellow paint (fastidiously squeezed through cheesecloth and whipped with an electric mixer by his assistants) that he moves across the canvas with the skill of someone who's been working since the 1940s. He adds blue and red, and at once there are these two beautiful paintings in an enormous white room with no sound in it aside from the echo of Richter's movements.
When the artist approaches the work with his famous squeegee, the Plexiglass instrument he builds to scrape and blur the painted surface, there's a moment of shock — like he's going to ruin the whole thing. But you quickly learn to trust Richter's instincts, so much so that when he almost stops the film's production — telling Belz that it's not working, that he can't paint while being seen — you wonder what it is he's worried about. He's clearly making great work.
But that's the appeal of the artist that this documentary captures. He is vulnerable and unsure of his choices at every turn. Even as the now 80-year-old artist speaks to his strikingly beautiful young wife, or has his picture snapped by a crowd of photographers that could rival anything on TMZ, you get the feeling that the artist is somehow detached from the paintings he creates. In one shot, Richter and an assistant move two large canvases around a gallery floor, hidden behind the works as they hold onto the wooden beams along the frames. For a moment it looks like the paintings are wandering around the gallery space on their own. Richter, intriguingly, is nowhere to be found.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com.
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