The following critics have also written about this artist: Sofía Imber Marta Traba Juan Calzadilla Federico Bayerthal Roberto Guevara Kurt Leonhardt Carlos Silva Juan Carlos Palenzuela Marco Rodríguez del Camino María Elena Ramos Maria Luz Cárdenas Bélgica Rodríguez Dieter Mahlow Hans Hoffman Otto Pannewitz

The Space Interlaced
By Juan Carlos Palenzuela

Although Luisa Richter has been presenting regular exhibitions in museums and galleries in Caracas since 1959, there can be appreciated in her workshop many of her works, especially those dated in the sixties. Not that her work lacks circulation among collectors, but rather that her creative process is very vast. I do not intend to create a phrase, but it happens that in an everyday, exclusive way Luisa Richter truly dedicates herself to the occupation of the plastic creation.

Therefore, when undertaking a new exhibition of the artist, not only her recent production from 1997-1998 is taken selectively into account her work of previous years, that is the seventies and the eighties.

A second look to Luisa Richter's work implies experiencing the certainty of approaching a plastic language. Hers is not made of popular access codes. It remains between planes and reflexes, between cross lines and connections, between instants and components, between emptiness and fullness, between the memory and the metaphor, between the canvas and the paper, in short, in the scenarios or visibility.

In her paintings, Richter uses textures, transparencies and planes of a spatial geometry. The subject of her painting is the space and its fugue. Geometry in the space without a center or time, in which, sometimes, brief figurative data happen in the middle of planes, reflexes and the persistent constructive sense. Fugue because of the depth of the space or the disposition of the lines. Fugue for the resource of the checkerboard and the visual changes it generates. But this has been transient in her work while the space remains and constitutes the axis of her doing. The Fugue, then, opposes to the idea of temporariness. Parallel to her painting there is the work on paper, the collage based on antique engravings, sketching, writing and painting, where the artist shows the multiple value of the signs; a whole potential of lines -of paper, a brush, ink- that rehearse a grammar of space.

The diagonals are very important and constitute alternative visual transits to the straight lines, to the lintels, to the frame that appears and reappears. Master Ivan Petrovszky has commented to me about her lines that "are full of personality, always straight, never undulating and generally of great sobriety". Lines linked and contrasted just as recommended by Delacroix.

There was a time when the critics talked about expressionism when referring to Richter's paintings, the same way that her palette held a wide chromatic registry. Then, in the eighties, blue accents prevailed in her painting. There were closed spaces, in perspectives, in diamonds that reflected obliquity and vice versa, with unfinished or open circles and squares, with colors behind colors, with wide lines that structured the fragments of the construction, with a displacing chromatic richness. Progressively, the textures, the dynamics of the matter the aggressiveness of the image.

Then there came a change not only in color, but also in the resource of the line, many times wide and in first plane, as if refunding the occurrence of the work. Shades of gray and white spaces so as to signal a melancholy of the painter, of that which constitutes a vision in permanency.

When we see her oil "Slice of Earth", from 1959, we find various clues to of all her doing: the light that comes from the bottom of the work, the energetic lines of the brush framing the space, a color between gray, blue and black and even her author signature in capital letters. The affinity with "Contours" of 1974 is astonishing. The links with the "House of the Oblivion" of 1984 reveal the coherence of a visual thought. The phrasing with "Tacarigua" of 1988, careful in its formulation, is characteristic of a vision that sustains itself in the midst of its renovation. I have heard Petrovsky say this phrase to define Richter's painting: "She has the chromatism of chamber music, since with little instruments she reaches the tonal purity".

In 1980, Roberto Guevara referred to Richters' canvas as the "place of verification", that of individual truth, that of the image as an experience of reality. Stated Guevara as well that "the double ambit of times" implied by this work, for which reason we also understand the dual space of the vision between the interior condition of the being and the eternal data of the circumstances.

This double ambit is elaborated by Luisa Richter starting from the white, from white tones that can become gray or atmospheric blues and cross through the remains of ochre. White in wide and strong traces, whites that pass from one plan to another. Lines and colors in a process of expanding or concentrating instants and perimeters. "White Spaces" was the title of a series of oils of hers shown in Venice in 1978. White, says Cirlot, "is in a certain way more than a color" and then attributes to it the value of symbolizing the wholeness and the synthesis of the variety. White as a unique element that is at the same time atmosphere, matter, line, gestuality and sign. White is the reaffirmation of the sensible image.

All the above goes back to the primary point according to which the work is matter and form. In Richter's case, her expressive forms are not only traditional squares and rectangles, but even small ovals, long rectangles and very big or reduced formats. Also, not only she integrates canvas and paper, but also she even takes for herself fragments of her work - that for some reason did not interest her in their integrity - to incorporate them again in new creations. Her sense of the collage, in conclusion, not only happens in her work on paper but also in her paintings.

The matter continues to be conditioned by accumulations, although from the time the process is based on white and grays, her space, her sign, her graphics, is made beyond the light, it happens behind her architecture. "Between the light and things" -she would say. Light, that in her case, as told by Maria Elena Ramos in 1988, acts "as a maker of the fluids, the unfinished".

All along the years Richter's work is characterized by a synthesis of language, a persistence of the existential question, by insisting visuals based on transmutation. Her work is the result of an interiorization and her call occurs within the enigma that could be a reflection of ourselves.

"Painting, says the artist, brings every time a new surprise"

Juan Carlos Palenzuela
Caracas, Venezuela
January 1999