The inherent qualities of oil paint provide for infinite possibilities. It is a
sensual and complex world of pigments, thickness, texture and illusion.
Paint is something scientific and something you feel. Daniel Richter’s
Grünspan (fertig ist die möhre), painted in 2002, employs an adept method
of exploiting color in oil enriching the layers of motion, which are built by
layers of paint.This astute and distinct synthesis is dually defined through
both his manipulation of the medium and its symbolic capacity. Richter’s
Grünspan series employs visual concepts nascent within verdigris, a
common name for a compound formed when copper, brass or bronze
is weathered and oxidizes, generating an acidic and vibrant green. Until the
19th century, it was often used as a pigment in oil paint. Verdigris’s unusual
lightfastness created a specific need for the pigment to be carefully
prepared, layered and immediately sealed with varnish. Its initial blue-green
hue then becomes a stable and more earthly green.
“Richter’s Pictorial Spaces do not replicate the world we love in or the
images that we have of it, because they don’t adopt the usual, dominant
gaze.They resist rational notions of space and traditional aesthetics alike.
All the hints at a third dimension only intensify the feeling that the more
one purses the illusion of abstract geometric perfection the less room for
maneuver there is, and the more clearly the setting proves to be a heterotopia,
a place where a very different order applies.These so-called abstract
paintings are filled with just such tiny elements of movements. Indeed,
faced with their baroque, very consciously constructed layers of movement.
One can soon be led astray by these minute particles, which counter the
delirium, unleashed by the picture as a whole.With a material constant
reality, however small and almost helpless it may be,” (J. Heynen, “Verdigris
or Gold Dust,” Daniel Richter: Grünspan, 2002, p. 79).
Richter cleverly hints at the long tradition of painting and great old masters
while his own hand manipulates paint in intricate strokes for a modern era.
The flight of songbirds circling around the open-mouthed, gaping expressions
of the faceless human forms all call to mind the Medieval concept of death:
it was believed that at the time the human body left the physical earth a
bird escaped from the open mouths of the dead.Tense and looming in its
mood, Grünspan (fertig ist die möhre) states its subsistence through this
quirky, lurid, turbulent pigment and evocative symbols.