'September'
Richter's painting of 'September' is a relatively small painting, 52 x 72cm, Richter resisted enlarging his canvas to the scope of the event and instead found more meaning in a domestic size. 'September' is close to the size and shape of a flat-screen TV, matching the proportions of the vessel through which we learned the terrible news.
Richter said that, even with the scale right, when he originally tried to paint the burning towers, in 2005, he couldn’t stomach the results. Working in his classic photo-realist style, he found that the towers’ glowing flames felt garish and attractive. Richter took his failed painting, scraped off most of its surface detail, and smeared an abstract veil of grey on top of what was left. Richter applied the techniques of unpainting and since the subject is the erasure of a building, it’s the perfect metaphor.
Richter gives us a way to view the carnage: the image is so imprinted on our psyches that we recognise it in a painting that is close to obliterated. How can a painting contain the scale, scope and meaning of the moment? As a painter how can you do justice to a theme such as this? Richter's blurred and almost unseeable painting gives you a sense of the violence, catastrophe and enormity of the subject. It would seem impossible to condense such a subject into art, yet Richter has made a painting which feels somewhat haunting and true.
