Phantom Interceptors 1964

Gerhard Richter made *Phantom Interceptors* using paint in a gray scale, and wow, it’s all about blurred movement. I’m thinking about how Richter might have been feeling when he made this, maybe unsure, maybe troubled. The smudgy planes have this uneasy feeling. I love the way Richter blurs the images, and the grayscale gives it an even more detached and dreamy quality. Richter is known for using photographs as source material and blurring the images, and you see here the idea of photography colliding with painting. You get a sense of something real, something seen, and then it all becomes slippery and vague. It is as if Richter is showing us the way images can haunt us, stay with us, even when they aren’t totally clear. All painters are in dialogue; they learn from each other, riff on each other’s ideas, and push the medium in new directions.