Painting in a World of New Media

In combining photography and painting, what could the artist Gerhard Richter be saying about photography and how does this relate to Reijnders’ argument?

Richter’s overpainted photographs combine large-scale abstract painting with snapshot photography, with different ratios of paint to photo. When viewing his work there is a tendency to look past the paint to try to figure out what the world behind it is and yet the view is obstructed and the viewer must look at the paint. The paint confronts you. Whenever we open our eyes we basically see what could easily be turned into a photograph, and thus just viewing a photograph is not confrontational in itself. The content and messages expressed in the photo could be confrontational, the actual medium of photography is not. However, viewing paint is not a natural experience and thus the painted surface is automatically challenging. Richter’s art also draws attention to our tendency to try to see the “real” through paint. Whenever we view a painting we try to see the “real world” or the real feelings behind it, but as Reijnders argues painting has no essence, it has nothing to communicate.


What did Reijnders mean by the “omnipresence of topicality”? Reijnders brings up the term topicality in the quote, “The acceleration of the contemporary media means that we are now confronted with something quite different: the omnipresence of topicality. A topicality that does not allow history to progress but absorbs it…. Technically speaking, painting has disappeared entirely from sight, but conversely, this allows it to observe what is topical from its ambush and to suddenly leap out in quite an unexpected guise.”

The dictionary defines topicality as “of or belonging to a particular location or place, local; or currently of interest; contemporary.” I can’t be sure what Reijnders means by topicality exactly, but I will do my best to interpret this quote. It seems like he uses topicality in regards to media to say that technological media has created an environment where we are surrounded by media that is rooted in the current time, so instead of looking forwards and backwards, we are looking at now. The avant-garde doesn’t fit in because it is based on the idea of forward progress, meanwhile painting itself isn’t really based on anything so can come back to comment on what is topical, or current.