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An Article by Our French Correspondent LD (923 words, 5 min. read)
Entering a Sanctuary of Glass and Silence
The Fondation Louis Vuitton appears like a dream made of glass, air, and movement. Its curved sails shimmer with reflections of the sky, and every step toward the entrance feels like an invitation to slow down and breathe. Inside this architectural vessel, the world softens. Time stretches. Thoughts grow quieter.
It is within this luminous calm that the Gerhard Richter exhibition unfolds. The space does not simply show his work. It receives it with tenderness. It offers it the serenity it deserves. The encounter feels intimate, as if each visitor enters a vast and gentle inner landscape.
A Life of Creation Spanning Six Decades
The exhibition gathers more than two hundred and seventy works that trace the evolution of a mind endlessly in search of truth through image, gesture, and light. The abundance of formats — paintings, glass sculptures, drawings, overpainted photographs — creates a rhythm that resembles a heartbeat. One feels the pulse of a life dedicated to observing the world with extraordinary sensitivity.
Each room holds its own emotional climate. Some spaces feel like whispered memories. Others ignite with color, vibration, and courage. Together, they compose the portrait of an artist who expresses deeply what he wants to say through his paintings.
The Tender Blur of Memory
Richter’s early paintings, inspired by photographs, hover between presence and disappearance. The gentle blur across their surfaces feels like the breath of time passing over an image. Faces soften. Landscapes dissolve at the edges. Reality becomes tender.
These works awaken something deeply human. They reflect the way we remember — not with precision, but with emotion. The blur carries warmth, melancholy, and intimacy. It allows the viewer to feel rather than recognize. Standing before them feels like holding an old memory in the palm of one’s hand.
The Radiance of Abstraction
Then comes the explosion: color, gesture, gravity, energy. Richter’s abstract paintings sweep across the galleries with monumental force. Layer after layer, the surface becomes a field of movement. Reds vibrate like pulses. Greens breathe like forests. Blues widen like horizons.
The squeegee marks appear as traces of choices, locations, and revelations. The colors collide, merge, disappear, reappear. These works feel alive. They expand beyond the canvas as if they want to touch the walls, the light, and the viewer’s inner world.
Richter does not portray emotion. He releases it.
The Technique: His Original Gesture with a Blade of Steel
Gerhard Richter’s abstractions emerge through an original technique that he developed himself, using a large steel blade he designed specifically for this purpose. This long, weighty tool—visible in the photographs of him at work—allows him to drag layers of paint across the canvas with both force and grace. It applies vibrant fields of color and then pulls the blade in sweeping movements, revealing and concealing previous layers in a single gesture. The surface becomes a living palimpsest where pigments collide, dissolve, and reappear. Through this unique method, Richter transforms the act of painting into a physical meditation, allowing color, chance, and emotion to rise through the strata of paint like memories of an inner landscape.
Glass as a Portal to Infinity
The glass and steel sculptures offer a moment of delicate stillness. Their transparency opens the space. Their reflections multiply the world. Each step changes the work completely, as if the sculpture were quietly adjusting itself to the rhythm of the visitor’s breath.
These pieces offer a rare form of purity. They are both present and ephemeral. They speak of infinity with quiet elegance. They remind us that seeing is a living act, never fixed, always evolving.
History, Humanity, and the Weight of Silence
Across the exhibition, a subtle thread of history emerges. It is discreet. It resonates. Some works hold the softness of personal recollection. Others carry the gravity of shared human memory. Richter explores history with sensitivity, never imposing, always inviting reflection.
There is a dignity in this. A respect for what cannot be fully shown, yet must be felt.
A Curated Experience That Feels Like a Journey of the Soul
The Fondation Louis Vuitton offers a scenography that honors the depth of Richter’s œuvre. Light moves gently across the surfaces. Rooms flow into one another like chapters of a long, contemplative novel. The visitor is guided, but never constrained. The experience feels free, open, and profoundly human.
Every transition is a breath. Every artwork becomes a moment of pause. One walks not only through a retrospective, but through a meditation.
A Celebration of an Artist Who Paints the Invisible
This exhibition reveals an artist who transforms perception into poetry. Richter paints the visible world, yet he also paints everything that escapes it — memory, emotion, silence, possibility. He seeks resonance.
To encounter his work in this setting feels like standing inside a symphony of light. Each piece becomes a note in a vast musical landscape. The exhibition becomes a place where the heart looks before the eyes do.
Leaving with a New Way of Seeing
As visitors step out into the daylight, something remains inside them — a softness, a widening, a sense that vision has become richer. Gerhard Richter’s work lingers like a quiet music. It continues to glow long after the exhibition ends.
This retrospective is not only a tribute to an extraordinary artist. It is a celebration of perception itself. It offers the rare gift of transforming the way we look at the world, and perhaps even the way we look at ourselves.
