Richard Ward places colours next to one another so that one thinks they were always there in that place. I see right through the painting to the other side, where I discover the surface. And then I do it again.
I would like to live with his paintings.

- Jerry Zeniuk 2016

Eine abstrakte Farbmalerei, eindrucksvoll in ihrer Stärke, imposant in ihrem Auftrag, überraschend in ihrer Formgebung - Neugier weckend, zum Inne halten anregend -

das sind die Werke des Künstlers Richard Ward.

 Eine Bildbetrachtung folgt. Begrifflichkeiten liegen auf der Hand, wie Bildgegenstände, Bildraum, Blicklenkung, Komposition. Worte, die bei einer ersten Bildbetrachtung eigentlich immer zu Beginn fallen sollten. Diese geben dem Betrachter Werkzeuge an die Hand, um einem Kunstwerk näher zu kommen, es zu verstehen. Denn eigentlich möchte doch jedermann ein Kunstwerk verstehen, wenn nicht auf den ersten Blick, dann doch bitte auf den zweiten.

 Aber bei genauerer Betrachtung wird der Betrachter bei den Werken Richards Wards feststellen: ihnen geht es gar nicht darum auf den ersten, auf den zweiten oder auf den hundertsten Blick verstanden zu werden. Sie laden dazu ein, in ihnen zu versinken. Nimmt der Betrachter die Einladung an, so eröffnen sich ihm Bildräume, die er gar nicht zu entdecken erhofft hatte. Sein Auge wird immer wieder Neues sehen und finden, wie gegenständliche Elemente in einem auf den ersten Blick abstrakten Gemälde. Am Ende wird er es vielleicht auch hinterfragen: kann ein Gemälde abstrakt und gegenständlich zugleich sein? Ist die Gewichtung der Formen und Flächen im Bildraum festgeschrieben? Warum sehe ich an dem einen Tag das Eine, an dem anderen Tag das Andere so präsent? Dieses Hinterfragen ist der Schlüssel zu dem Werk des Künstlers.

 Richard Ward möchte das Auge des Betrachters anregen, etwas Eigenes in seinen Gemälden zu finden. Der Künstler geht nicht in den direkten Dialog mit dem Betrachter. Diesen soll er selbst führen, mit sich und dem Gemälde. Für den einen ist das Vorne hinten, für den anderen das Hinten vorne. Die einen sehen nur abstrakte Elemente, die anderen nur Gegenständliche und wieder die anderen sehen vor allem ein Miteinander aus Flächen und Formen.

 Diese Farbwelten, wie der Künstler seine Werke auch nennt, lassen somit immer etwas Neues entstehen. Das liegt vor allem an der Reife, die jedem Werk zu Grunde liegt, die bereits auf den ersten Blick zu spüren ist. Der Pinselstrich Richards Wards ist kein spontaner und expressiver, auch wenn er auf den ersten Blick so wirkt. Er ist gezielt gesetzt und geführt. Und eigentlich nicht wichtig. Denn es ist das Ganze, was zählt. Dieses entsteht laut Ward beim intensiven Malprozess aber meist erst am Ende, mit der gezielten Setzung der letzten kleinen Details. Genau diese machen aus der reinen Farb- und Form- eine Bildwelt, in der so vielfältigste Bildräume im Innen und Außen entstehen können, aber aus der abstrakten Form heraus, nicht aus der konkreten Vorlage.  

 So geben die Werke Richards Wards dem Betrachter nichts an die Hand, doch lassen ihn daran versinken und immer wieder Neues für sich entdecken. Es sind keine Werke für die reine Dekoration, es sind Werke für die Seele. Sie wollen nichts, können aber vieles.

- Friederike Langkau 2022

Richard entwickelt seine Bilder aus dem großen Fundus seiner lebenslangen tiefen Liebe zur Natur.
Die zunächst gut erkennbaren Naturelemente verwandelt er in abstrakte Kunstwerke, die uns entführen, beeindrucken und verzaubern.
Die Bilder nehmen den Betrachter mit in eine Tiefe, zu Schätzen, wie sie nur in der Natur und auf dem Grund der Seele zu finden sind.

- Christine Zohner 2022

Richard’s work has evolved and changed over the period I have known him, but it has had the constant effect on me of being both familiar and mysterious.  It has the effect of presenting challenges to me as a fellow painter. It raises fundamental questions: What should a painting do? What is a successful painting? How should it work? How much should the artist be present in his or her work?

How does it pose all these questions?

It is easy to say what it is not doing, and which so much other painting today does in our noisy trigger culture. It does not seduce or flatter; use cliché; use an existing style to claim value; fake a cool easy naturalism; rehearse self-serving identity claims; re-enact a theatrical painterly parody of creative inspiration; demonstrate virtuosity. It does not give easy answers in any of these ways. Instead- with determined distinction - it reveals an activity based in quiet, in purification, and in concentration.

Part of the uniqueness of Richard’s work is the way that it demands interpretation. There is a strand of ‘pure’ abstraction which attempts to repel questioning, for example Alan Gouk’s large colourful work. While one can sense some underlying formal influence of this British response to Matisse and American Colour Field painting in the block structure of Richard’s work, it has been taken away from pure colour, abstract scale, optical existence. It is active in a mysterious way which challenges the sensibility, but without an obvious identity to take its place and provide a key to response. So any interpretation has to look not so much at what is happening on the painted surface, but paradoxically rather what seems to underlie it- what is communicated through it.

The strength of mood and purpose in the paintings is compelling. Each is different, connected to the place and time of execution. But underneath is a constant bedrock of an unusual sensibility.

Richard was immersed in the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein as a philosophy undergraduate at Cambridge. I think this shows in tensions within his work: between the simple unit as a self-sufficient given and the need for the work to become a whole- to become visual language, and the tension between the moral demand to remain silent before the ineffable and the need to point towards it.

Most formally striking is that most of the recent paintings are composed of blocks of layered but barely interconnected colour, which leave open questions of the unity of the whole painting, the possibility of a resolution through such unity, and the notion of a single ‘meaning’ in such a resolution. This direct immanence of nearly unitary form and material echoes the foundational claim of the Tractatus: that linguistic meaning is grounded in simple ‘truths/facts’ about the world which can neither be broken down further, nor combined without risking error. In others,  the demand for painting to become a speaking language, pushes him towards interconnection and fluidity. But in a third sort the reception of a transcendent ‘meaning’ in the form of an image- which is itself often an image of transcendence (as we shall see)- reminds us of both the negative ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’, and Wittgenstein’s later notion that certain things cannot be said but only shown.

There is a further strange tension which runs through the work. There is both the unusual absence of any unifying musical or lyrical quality, which can make the painting seem almost brutal, and the strong impression of sensibility in the often great delicacy in the handling of the paint. The first is because the blocks of colour have often little in common and are arranged without clear rhythm so there seems no unifying theme which could give rise to a lyrical enchantment. This coupled with weight of the wall of blocks could result in an oppressive insistent feel. But this is sometimes avoided by the wall being cemented with tonally light or dark areas between the blocks. In earlier work the palette knife was used to with great delicacy to nudge colour shapes up to each other. Recently the blocks have been overpainted with faster zigzagging or parallel brushstrokes of brighter contrast colour which also almost- but not quite- travel between the blocks, to partially connect them at least by implication, and begin to create a potentially more unified surface pattern. Sometimes this can feel forced, or half hearted- as if done from a sense of formal necessity rather than a wholly intuitive commitment. But at others a rhythm takes hold, and the eye moves.

In most works space is held between the vertical and the horizontal- the surface is neither flat nor deep, we are looking neither up nor down. But it is not closed either: between the blocks of low relief colour sitting on the surface plane and the gaps between the blocks which have either a receding darkness or a radiant light, both creating a space beyond.

There is a certain awkwardness which reminds me of the early mature work of Paul Cezanne, which has the same purity of purpose. Merleau-Ponty describes how the landscape painted itself through him as an example of how we are more of the world than we think, but he later came up with the ontological category of ‘flesh’ [la chair] to name our fundamental physical/spiritual imbrication with our surroundings, and thus to finally destroy the metaphysical heritage of the subject/object distinction. This better describes the physicality and melding of the optical and tactile in Cezanne’s still-lives. It also seems to hold the closeness and insistent flatness with which Richard’s paintings hold us both close and far at the same time- keeping us away but not allowing us to walk back, not allowing us either the resolution of allowing us to see it as a thing- a canvas covered in paint to be responded to aesthetically or psychologically, or as a representation of other things in the world- to be responded to by association, memory etc. Instead, we are faced with a dense overlapping surface which has touch but little visual space, strong mood but little reference, a compelling density.

Like early Cezanne it is monumental but not grandiose. There is little architectural order. Drawing is reduced to short strokes- notations of possibilities- minimal articulation without virtuosity. One senses that, as with early Cezanne, connections across the canvas are made with an effort, that the element most natural to the painter is the single object, even the single stroke or short series of strokes. Connections are made laboriously, because, as this is the zone of risk where both solutions and frustrations, greater truth, and greater error, lie. Both are attempting to formulate a pictorial ‘space’ which does not contain objects but which is made by objects. In Richard’s case the ‘objects’ are the painterly units.

This lack of depth or progression contributes to a particular sense of timelessness which both painters’ images share. The paintings often give one the uncanny feeling that the image is either frozen in the process of approaching a moment of perfect realisation, or that that has just passed. This combination of the imperfect and the intemporal, was the rediscovery by Twentieth Century European primitivism of an ethos ousted by Christian Neoplatonism (which only recognised immortality in perfection), which Richard gives a new twist to.

Sometimes it stirs a similar frustration to Cezanne: just say it – get to the point… There is the sense of a game or move cut short- as if Wittgenstein’s builders from the beginning of The Philosophical Investigations had called for block and beam but they are left suspended in the air refrozen in partial atomism as the language game of pictorial art has broken down, the players have just stopped. What role has the viewer? Is he to keep it going himself- to complete the game himself – or just contemplate the static moment as perhaps a snapshot of an action cut short? What is the game?

It can seem that there is a cruelty, or its staging, in this inescapable immanence, this challenging density often vibrating with hard strokes of harsh colour. There are traces of German Expressionism in the earth colours or the faster more fluid strokes, the more unified landscapes, but no trace of its theatrical alienation or exotic primitivism, no pandering to the rewards of exaggeration or voyeurism. Rather the work is pervaded by the high-minded tone of European Modernism- Viennese via Wittgenstein- but avoiding the sterility of an over simple purity. The acceptance of a degree of muddy confusion and uncertainty points to an underlying less absolutist British pragmatism, particularly in the less resolved abstract works where the viewer is left considerable space for interpretation.

The symbolism which appears in the lamp dominated interiors and some of the tree dominated works is perhaps an unconscious counterpoint to these uncertainties. These remind me of that awkward British Modernist mix of formal experiment, and spiritual transcendentalism, within a domestic setting, as seen most acutely in the writing of Virginia Woolf and T.S.Eliot. In these paintings trees and lamps share the same shape: a rectangular head and a straight stem. Both seem to pin down the image, insisting on presence, consciousness, and eternity within it. The lamp seems symbolic of the light of a possibly transcendent mind, steady and stoical, the tree the presence of hope in and through Nature.

Richard’s work is the reflection of these characteristics: an acceptance of suffering; a stern insistence on personal experience and epistemic clarity; an acceptance of modesty and doubt; a mystical sense of transcendence; hope in nature. Now more and more the paint is taking over, and colour and scale are increasing, and the strokes are bolder. But the most fundamental ethos is still Wittgenstein’s: to keep everything in question- to keep open the realm of puzzlement. His best paintings do this by creating a space which is neither ‘subjective’- the realm of ‘abstract possibility’ (construed as aesthetic, painterly, psychological, or even Platonic), nor ‘objective’- that of picturing physical reality. It is an exploration and expression of the most fundamental conundrum of the true artist’s relation to the world: all experience is inescapably mine- it cannot be fully shared with anyone, and it will end with my ending, yet it is also of something- external and internal - which transcends my conscious understanding, which is perhaps the only source of value and meaning for existence, and so calls for the attempt to reach towards it. The most important part of the value is in the attempt, and these paintings are both its result, and that assertion.

- Edward Pile 2022