Death of the Esoteric Painter

Staggering lines of electric red, orange and yellow pulse within the cavernous expanse of Daniel Richter’s Death of the Esoteric Painter, 2011. Two phosphorescent figures, one green and the other blue, fight to the death at the mouth of the cave. The painting thrums with energy as immaterial waves swell and conjoin, the invisible made visible in hallucinatory colour. Although Richter often paints people, he is uninterested in flesh, instead fascinated by the ethereal traces of a person’s spirit which he captures in painterly heatmaps. This visual disembodiment, what has been described as ‘anarchic’, is inspired by the shadow remnants picked up by infrared cameras, CCTV footage, and night vision goggles. Richter’s aesthetic is steeped in rebellion, and he considers these technologies as tools that can distort reality and render the familiar strange and surreal. He uses photographs as source material, but the images are subsumed by ‘compositions whose bright, seeping surfaces are both psychedelic and toxic’ (D. Baired, ‘Daniel Richter’, The Brooklyn Rail, June 1 2004). For Richter, the concern is not with verisimilitude or even corporeal representation. Rather his is invested in allegories as a means of illuminating the truth of an uncertain, sublime world.