Gehart Richter and Duality

Richter is one of the great living artists. His work is sometimes astonishing. I have often shown people his figurative paintings and they cannot believe that these are paint and not photography. And yet of course they are photography translated into paint. That is why he is so interesting. He is still working on this complex relationship between the eye of the camera and the eye of the artist. But if this were all I think it could be argued that Chuck Close maybe made this theme his own with the great paintings of the 60 and 70s. I remember standing in a gallery in Frankfurt and there was this huge Chuck Close on the wall in front of me. Some Japanese came up to me and asked whether the image was a large photograph or a painting? In the end does it matter? Well I guess it does for some reason. We love to think that the hand of person can achieve what a machine can achieve. Such a strange game, like a machine conducting an orchestra. We have always battled with machines. We probably always will. But Richter has a dual personality. Along with these extraordinary figurative images comes the "abstract" work. Paintings that are about pushing paint across a surface. Some people think these images are soulless as they are about the mechanics of paintings. They resemble the pallet of the artists at the end of work. Smudged paint that is often more beautiful than the image on the canvas. Perhaps this is it. Both the work from photographs and the abstract paintings are just the result of an artist at work who knows that at the end of the day, the image is all but the hand of the artist is the genius.