THIS CONSTRUCT FIELD, WHICH HIDES OR DESTROYS THE OBJECTIVE OR VISIBLE, UNDOUBTEDLY DIVERSIFIES WITH STRONG COLOR EMPHASES UPON THE POSSIBILITIES THAT GERHARD RICHTER'S DISTANCED GAZE INVESTIGATES WITH ABSTRACT COMPLEX EMPTINESS. IT IS THE PRODUCT OF PURELY ABSTRACT COMPREHENSION AND SENSATION BUILT UPON THE UNCANNY POSITIONS AND TENSE RELATIONSHIPS OF MATERIAL ELEMENTS. IT IS IMPORTANT THAT THIS PLASTIC, WHICH ASPIRES TO THE PICTORIAL AS AN ENERGETIC FIELD REFLECTING THE INTENSITY OF MEMORY AND THOUGHT TRACES, MULTIPLIES BY IMMEDIATELY TRANSFORMING INTO A SUBJECTLESS ABSTRACT FLOW. THE PROCESS OF REACHING PURE PAINTING, AN ABSTRACT CONCEPTUAL SPACE ON THE SCRATCHED SURFACE, IS ACTUALLY ACCOMPANYING THE EXISTING AND CONTINUOUS INDETERMINACY.

With the 1980s, approaches that handle the ready-made image potential with different methods independently from the Photorealist perspective and develop it as a new production field multiply strikingly. The process beginning with Warhol and Rauschenberg gains momentum with artists like Richter, Polke, and Sherman. Numerous works are produced that are loaded with function and meaning through personal and social memory and representation discussions. In this context, the tense relationship sensed especially between Gerhard Richter and photographic visuality results in the meeting of disturbing images with pictorial effect through blurring. With his paintings where photography is manipulated as a painted image event, the artist essentially usurps photography’s recording function, attempting to keep historical consciousness alive and concretize it by transforming it into painting. (1)

Gerhard Richter actually builds his art approach upon a production understanding that metamorphoses through perceptual differences and is shaped by border violations. The artist, who avoids production conforming to traditional aesthetic norms, finds himself in an environment that investigates the experimental through the interventionist attitude he undertakes, where connections appear disconnected. This will to change, sensed from the beginning, diverges and distances itself from realist narratives through a conflictual language with modern art. This situation—the destruction and reconstruction of the photographic image that constitutes its source—occurs in a trajectory that is distanced, personalized, cleansed of emotional burdens. Thus, the artist, who draws the visuality he reaches into a new historical context, clearly abandons painting’s narrative quality, its emotional depth possibilities. He attempts to blur disturbing personal historical data, the effects of mass and universal drama through this fiction. The abstract image made more disturbing now belongs excessively to him and/yet is not entirely related to him. As will be clearly seen, Richter, with intellectual intervention, is both establishing his own painting understanding and being dragged to the threshold of a new language and representation experience in an ontological context. The arrangement of a blurred painting surface is ultimately a different practice occurring away from modern art’s abstraction experiences. And it is undoubtedly a new phase of deformation and expressionist tendencies shaped with a conceptual opening.