1) …whether it be a poem, a painting or a piece of music, we experience an overflowing of emotion and a sense of fulfillment, a feeling of the expansion of the self, as if we had soared up to the heavens in accord with the subtle rhythms of the Universe. (book: Space and Eternal life; a dialogue between Chandra Wickramasinghe (astronomer) and Daisaku Ikeda (Buddhist Scholar).
2) The “subject” of a painting, if explicit, may well be a distraction: it has been argued that plastic qualities are all that count, and we take refuge in anecdote at our peril. Whether or not this is universally true, Hilton’s work constitutes one of the best arguments for believing it. (Roger Hilton: driven to abstraction by John Russell Taylor / from The Times (UK) August 12, 2008)
3) I coincidently came across this article in ‘The Times’ on the day I was going to the Serpentine gallery to see the work of Gerhard Richter. I liked GR because he did not keep to just one type of form but could go from photo realism to abstraction. He seemed to me constantly exploring and taking chances, like John Hoyland would in his paintings. In this series of paintings he went back to form he had done more than 40 years ago. 4900 Colours: Version II, are 49 painted panels, mounted on aluminium. The review isn’t good in that it was suggested that the work was dull and it was machine like. But looking at the range of Richter’s work you might think that that was what he was trying to put across. There is no good or bad in art. They all belong to the front-line of art. They all contribute to what is true in the arts. And should be valued the same for its contribution. Who says that art has to be always whoopy or yahoo.com. If it captures the opposite then it has manifested possibilities that could exist. It tells the story of the organic whole. Taking only part of the article will do it injustice so here is all of it below:
From The TimesSeptember 23, 2008—by Michael Glover
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The Dresden-born German artist Gerhard Richter is best known for his hauntingly strange, photography-based paintings, works that often seem to hover somewhere between the documentation of everyday life, and some Dantean netherworld of haunted beings. At the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, he has returned to an earlier manner of pure abstraction, the beginnings of which he first developed more than 40 years ago, when he made paintings based on industrial colour charts.
Here, in a show entitled 4900 Colours: Version II, are 49 painted panels, mounted on aluminium, each one a seemingly random variant upon the next. Each panel is 97cm square, and each of these panels contains small squares of pure colour – yellow, orange, red, blue, purple, green, etc. The colours themselves are bright, glossy and rowdy – they shout back at us like reflective household enamels, flawlessly applied.
There is no iconography here, not even the merest hint. Nor is there any of the moody, introspective sensitivity of a Rothko, or indeed any evidence of the personal touch. The panels lack texture, or any element of unevenness. They look smoothly unauthored, as if some machine brought them into being – a computer, for example.
The colour combinations are, in part, randomly generated; the way in which the paintings are displayed, on the other hand, has been determined by the human eye. They are all rigidly squared up to each other; one of the walls is a mirror image of its opposite.
Relentless abstraction of this kind has severe limitations. When the elements don’t challenge each other rhythmically in some way, the surfaces can look inert and unaffecting. When the colour combinations look crude and randomly chosen – as they do here – we don’t feel anything about them. Other than that they seem lacking in finesse, charm or sophistication of any kind.
When colour is used by any artist – Matisse, Bonnard or Richter – we want to see those colours working with each other in such a way that we begin to think differently about the world. This does not happen here. This is an art about the spurious autonomy of art-making; an art about the extinction of any idea of the personal. Unfortunately, the very idea is an absurdity. Man is not a machine. And man should not pretend to make art as if he were a machine. In that direction lies overwhelming dullness and the extinction of wonder.
Forty years ago a much younger and more outspoken Richter said that the authority of painting might legitimately come to challenge the authority of the priest or the philosopher. Not this kind of painting, though. In competition with this kind of painting, religion and philosophy win by several furlongs.
Serpentine Gallery (020 7402 6075) to November 16
4) Fré Ilgen artist – theorist
“The vastness of the cosmos with the planets and the microscopic world of particles define us and our perception of life. To me, creating art is a way to find out what this means.”