Lot 626 D

"The colour needs to be helped" said the 20th century colour painter Rupprecht Geiger. In the 1960s, Geiger realised this manifesto, which is fundamental to his work by means of a special painting technique with which, as in this painting, he created a fine, flat material structure with an almost pasty, in the broader sense not 'painted', but dabbed application. One could find associations to landscapes in the surfaces of Geiger's paintings; pointed modulated hills alternate with valleys; the light refracts in the scaly, matt paint structure and intensifies the tone of the colour in its refractions into force fields. Thus, Geiger develops his painting similarly to pictorial architecture consisting of colour and light and including a top and bottom. This was not the only difference between Geiger's works and the smooth and closed monochrome paintings of Ellsworth Kelly, Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhard. Geiger does in fact create an imaginary space with the horizontal and the two competing colour fields and sustains its resonance in the uniformity of the colour application. But "what does colour actually look like?" At the beginning of the anthology published in 1975, Geiger asks himself this question with regard to his theoretical considerations and immediately answers it himself: 'Colour cannot really be seen; when we look at it, it is often merely a symbol of a mood, a conveyed illusion. To actually see colour, one has to close one's eyes and contemplate it." (Rupprecht Geiger, Farbe ist Element, Dusseldorf 1975, unpag.). Geiger's pictures transform themselves more and more into the absolute; they gain in direct corporeality, and expand the theoretical approach. Geiger intensifies the luminous power of colours in tonal graduations; a nuance of orange and pink in the delicate gradient supports the red in an imaginary violet in unbroken and unique significance, and in strong contrast to a broken white. Geiger's high demands on the magical effect of colours have been splendidly fulfilled with this painting.