Richters Patterns

Ensemble Musikfabrik thrives on venturing beyond fixed musical boundaries. These modern-music specialists from Cologne have translated their words into deeds with the work entitled Richters

Patterns (without an apostrophe), which isan extraordinary collaboration between painter Gerhard Richter, director Corinna Belz and composer Marcus Schmickler. 

Gerhard Richter has spent years dreaming of a synthesis between visual art and modern music. With that in mind, he took photographs of segments of a new series of works, which were first exhibited in May 2016 in New York. Director Corinna Belz, known for her 2011 documentary, Gerhard Richter Painting, used these images to create a movie that wasn't filmed with a camera but generated by a computer algorithm programmed for the project. The film, which lasts 32 minutes, consists of more than 60,000 individual frames that were produced, processed and then edited by cinematographer Rudi Heinen to create moving images. 

‘The film is compiled from numerous ornamental patterns', explains Corinna Belz. 'The structures gradually become more refined, culminating in a rapid movement of horizontal stripes, reminiscent of Richter's Streifenbilder (Stripe Paintings). The strong visual rhythm in Richter's art is a frequent talking point, making it a logical step to add a layer of music to this cinematographic take on his work. You could even say that Marcus Schmickler's music makes the optical pulse, arising from the animation of the images, audible.’ 

German composer Marcus Schmickler (co-founder of the DJ collective Brüsseler-Platz-10a-Musik and also a post-rock producer under the pseudonym Pluramon), wrote the music for Richters Patterns (2016) parallel with the film’s creation. The film and composition follow their own independent logic, at times creating intentional friction between images and sound, although Schmickler did turn to Richter's Streifenbilder for inspiration. In that series, the painter sliced extremely thin strips from reproductions of his abstract paintings and turned them into new works with a distinctive striped pattern. ‘I wanted to “extend” that technique into the fields of sound and time’, says Schmickler. 'Moreover, the music develops at an extremely slow tempo, so the impression of a linear passage of time recedes into the background. Listeners experience these sounds as if they are looking at a painting.

The relationship between painting and music was also a significant theme in music from the previous century. Take for instance the work of the American composer Morton Feldman, who was a great admirer of such abstract-expressionist painters as Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston and Mark Rothko. Feldman composed his Rothko Chapel in 1971 in memory of Rothko and inspired by the fourteen black canvases hanging in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas.Feldman's music is reminiscent of a painting unfolding in time, with its soft-focus sound, monochrome textures and its progression that seems frozen in time. His work resists linguistic comparisons, has no narrative, no dramatic development of themes and is more spatial than linear. Listening to Feldman is like letting your gaze glide over a painting.