About Gerard Richter...
The overhead projector-aided traced oil paintings of photographs throughout his career are his more successful pieces (in my opinion)... insofar as the abstracts are paint phenomenon(s)... meaning "paint being paint" as opposed to "speaking through paint".... at any rate, this is my reading.
To the extent that he is at his core an optical visual artist... the carryover habit of the employment of pure optics involved in replicating photographs is evidenced in the abstracts and renders them handsome but almost exclusively as uncommunicative and impersonal mark-making.
Now, it goes without saying that purist mark marking is not negative. Eva Hesse is a positive example of that in early mid-60s paintings--see her 1962 Blind Swimmer (above), but Richter's abstractions smack a bit too much of DeKooning-like scale and feel to be digested as a new topic/perspective or emotion. Again... my opinion... see what you think.
