Engadin di Gerhard Richter – fare-immagine con l’over-painting

Résumé

This essay examines the series of over-painted photographs produced by Gerhard Richter at Sils-Maria in the Upper Engadine, brought together in the exhibition Engadin (Nietzsche-Haus, 1992 and 2023-2024). Drawing on the notion of a ‘Sils/Nietzsche constellation’, the author argues that Richter engages – in an elusive, non-citational manner – with the visual and material potential of the Engadine landscapes sedimented in Nietzsche’s writings. The essay addresses the technique of over-painting on photographic prints as practised by Gerhard Richter in the Sils-series, interpreting it as a shift from ‘making-photographs’ (photo-painting, in which the photograph serves as a projected model on canvas) to ‘making-images’ (through oil-on-photograph technique): by intervening painterly on the surface of the photograph, Richter neither imitates nor supplements the analogue image but attacks its representational function, extracting its own chromatic and structural elements and reapplying them in abstract form onto the same print. The result is a second-order doubling – painting superimposed on a reality already technically doubled by photography – generating an unresolved tension between figuration and abstraction, between the objectivity of the mechanical image and the subjectivity of the painterly gesture.