Form is all we have to help us cope with fundamentally chaotic facts and assaults. Formulating something is a great start. I trust form, trust my feeling or capacity to find the right form for something. Even if that is only by being well organized. That too is form.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of structure and organization in dealing with chaos and complexity.
Gerhard Richter's quote suggests that in the face of chaotic realities, the establishment of form and structure becomes essential for understanding and managing our experiences. By 'form,' he refers not only to physical or artistic structures but also to mental organization that allows us to navigate through uncertainty. Trusting in one's ability to create and maintain order is fundamental to coping with the unpredictability of life.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a workshop on time management to highlight the value of being organized.
Painting is the making of an analogy for something non-visual and incomprehensible - giving it form and bringing it within reach. And that is why good paintings are incomprehensible. Creating the incomprehensible has absolutely nothing to do with turning out any old bunkum, because bunkum is always comprehensible.
Painting is another form of thinking.
My landscapes are not only beautiful, or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful.' By 'untruthful,' I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature. Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless, the total antithesis of ourselves.
I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)
To talk about paintings is not only difficult but perhaps pointless too. You can only express in words what words are capable of expressing-- what language can communicate. Painting has nothing to do with that.
Almost every work of art is an analogy. When I make a representation of something, this too is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it. I prefer to steer clear of anything aesthetic, so as not to set obstacles in my own way and not to have the problem of people saying: 'Ah, yes, that's how he sees the world, that's his interpretation.'
But now that I am old, moving every year closer to the end of my life, I also feel closer to the beginning. And I remember everything that happened that day becasue it has happened many times in my life. The same innocence, trust, and restlessness; the wonder, fear, and lonliness. How I lost myself. I remember all these things. And tonight, on the fifteenth day of the eighth moon, I also remember what I asked the Moon Lady so long ago. I wished to be found.
As Black people, we're very used to empathizing with the world through white people's eyes, because they're the protagonists. I know what it's like to look at the world and empathize with Superman because I spent my whole life doing that.
I learned to make my mind large, as the universe is large, so that there is room for contradictions.
We are the species who cooks. No other species cooks. And when we learned to cook, we became truly human.
But Philip was impatient with himself; he called to mind his idea of the pattern of life: the unhappiness he had suffered was no more than part of a decoration which was elaborate and beautiful; he told himself strenuously that he must accept with gaiety everything, dreariness and excitement, pleasure and pain, because it added to the richness of the design.
Since childhood, I was afflicted with a sick hypersensitivity, and my imagination quickly turned everything into a memory, too quickly: sometimes one day was enough, or an interval of a few hours, or a routine change of place, for an everyday event with a lyrical value that I did not sense at the time, to become suddenly adorned with a radiant echo, the echo ordinarily reserved only for those memories which have been standing for many years in the powerful fixative of lyrical oblivion.
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