Richthofen’s latest body of work pushes the boundary between language and abstraction. Drawings and paintings incorporating text fragments—sometimes bold, sometimes illegible and obscure, blurred, sprayed over, or blacked out—reflect a tension between revelation and concealment.

The exhibition SWALLOWED BULLETS features a new series of eleven text-based abstractions installed in a rhythmic procession along the walls of the main gallery space of Dittrich & Schlechtriem, with each work uniformly measuring 200 x 170 cm. It also includes a new series of works on paper, framed under tinted acrylic glass.

The paintings form an integral part of the poem “Swallowed Bullets,” composed by Richthofen and incorporated into a live performance, on the occasion of the show’s opening. The audience is invited to engage with the poem as a multisensory experience. Its essence can be encountered both through the ephemeral, auditory immediacy of the live performance and the enduring presence of its abstracted words dispersed on the canvases throughout the exhibition space.

Swallowed Bullets
Essay by Laura Helena Wurth

This text, which is meant as a companion to Monty Richthofen’s works of art, hypothesizes that language can create reality. It must assume as much, for else it need not have let itself be written. All the words that have been put to use in the following could just as well have remained in the ether of meaninglessness. In the slipstream of that assumption, however, words are concatenated here in an effort to chart an approach to an oeuvre that is composed of language, that has made language its basis, and that is constantly changing, just as reality keeps recomposing itself afresh at every instant.

Formally speaking, this new exhibition by Monty Richthofen lets us observe his creative manipulation of a poem and how that poem, which Richthofen wrote, disintegrates, disappears, recomposing itself elsewhere, only to resurface. In the course of the exhibition, it will manifest itself in different forms of representation. Formally speaking, someone has found a way to lend aesthetic expression to the evanescence of spoken language. For language does not engender an absolute truth. And so Richthofen and his truth, too, remain mutable, fragmented, and in need of interpretation.

The point of departure is marked by eleven paintings in large formats on view in the gallery’s main space. The poem runs through all of them but is blacked out again and again so that any reading remains fragmentary. What one cannot read, what the mind must supply, is articulated by the pictures’ speaking titles: “THE TRUTH NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR” or “THE NIGHTMARE I NEVER DREAMED OF LIVING.” In some instances, passages of the poem are overpainted with cloudlike black shapes that make the writing look like charred logs left after a blazing fire, the residues of excess. In other instances, the writing with its ostensible univocity is interrupted by precise square fields, an addition to the visual vocabulary. They function as an antithesis to the overpainting with its air of impulsiveness. The palette is limited. In most cases, Richthofen works with two colors. The pictures featuring black on bright yellow (“GLOBAL WARMING 4EVA”) or the words “KILL YOUR INNER CEO” in just barely legible letters on dense orange seem positively designed to send a signal, calling out: “Attention! Something is happening here that merits a closer look!” Standing in front of one of the large-format canvases (200 x 170 cm / 79 x 67 in) and trying to figure out what the original text may have been, the beholder becomes a kind of archaeologist descending into the different rock strata that overlie the writing, bearing witness to human existence.

These paintings are flanked by drawings one may read as notes that provide them with a context. They were not made in immediate connection with the paintings but around the same time. What preoccupied the artist as he worked on the paintings also finds expression in the drawings. They are framed under dark hoods, for an effect not unlike the redactions with black paint. The result is an inscrutability that one cannot reconcile oneself to. One tries to penetrate what is concealed by the hood. The works are notes of the sort one takes down during a phone call, unconsciously also committing to them what is on one’s mind, an unadulterated reflection of the spirit of the present moment.

The poem reappears in many different guises throughout the exhibition. The visual part remains, but there is an audible dimension as well that can be experienced only when it is performed and then vanishes.

Together with the musician Moritz Haas, Richthofen has found sounds to accompany the words. In the framework of a performance, the poem thus makes its way into physical space, revealing another dimension and disclosing a multifaceted quality that is otherwise latent. The performance is not recorded and not preserved. It can be experienced only at this one instant, in this one place. It is an evanescent condition, like a gas that, though present, is invisible and dissipates after a while. The poem spreads out and rises from the two dimensions of the canvas. The words cross the confines of the space of language and manifest the meaning of art as the last redoubt of the physical here and now. The present hardly ever attains greater density than in the moment of performance. The conjunction of the immediacy produced by that moment with the pictures containing their message in permanent yet occult form engenders a dynamic tension within the exhibition.

Richthofen has a background in graffiti art, where nothing is made to last forever, where every spot of paint placed on a surface is a victory and overwriting is factored in from the outset. Another way to read this approach is that there is not the one, the definitive picture, only manifold potential manifestations, and the artist always bears in mind that the present is in flux. By overpainting and layering words with paint, deliberately omitting disambiguation, and letting the words slide into sounds, Richthofen forges an aesthetic expression for the ephemerality and equivocation of spoken language.

This painting is capable of acknowledging that the present can only be rendered by an image in motion, in transformation. Yet Richthofen is not a painter, not a poet, and not a graphic artist. He does all these things, but none of them in the classical sense. Rather, Richthofen works with the medium that is best suited as a vehicle for his message. That is why he intuitively practices what is often called interdisciplinarity, making art that blends poetry, sound, and painting. The messages of his works are as fluid as the media in which he encodes them. And so one must read and perceive all of them—the pictures, the sound, the poetry—together to grasp the complex statement of his art.

It is a constant balancing act between personal freedom and responsibility for which Richthofen here devises an aesthetic equivalent, without insisting on disambiguation. Tolerance for such equivocation is one of the greatest challenges of our time, which clamors for simple truths. In reality, truth is an imprecise idea and only rarely reveals itself. It is bashful and likes to veil itself, is shouted down by so-called “fake news” and simplified representations of states of affairs that are complex.

This situation adds to the urgency of our need for an art that defies such univocity, that challenges its beholders, that dares to leave them in the dark only to embrace them again in the bodily encounter. Richthofen’s art cavalierly explodes the categories into which people like to shoehorn artists. Perhaps one should classify his oeuvre as conceptual so as to extricate it from the narrowly demarcated field of painting. For Richthofen’s art takes possession of the space, occupies it, and extends it beyond all constraints.

It does not meet anyone halfway, it does not offer simple solutions, instead facing up to the world as it is now and finding ways to tolerate its ambiguities and lend expression to them. This expression has arguably never shown itself to be more full of promise than now.

Laura Helena Wurth, born in Berlin, is an author and critic. She regularly writes about contemporary art and architecture for FAZ, FAS, and KUNSTFORUM International. She also works for Deutschlandfunk Kultur. She is a co-founder of the project space FKA SIX, located in a shopping mall and dedicated to the theme of contemporary ruins. Together with Louisa Hölker, she publishes the monographic art magazine One to(o) Many, which brings together many different voices into a single work of art.

Photography by Jens Ziehe & RUKH Berlin

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