STANLEY CASSELMAN | IR-42

Private Collection, New York 

“Then came Stanley Casselman… He hadn’t copied one painting: These were originals in the manner of Richter. All had nifty squeegee sluices of blurry paint, but they were either too pretty or illusionistic or atmospheric… The examples of Stanley’s own art that I saw are nothing like Richter’s. They’re highly crafted abstract minimalist works. Not to my taste, but done impeccably. Which turns out to be key for copying: He is a practiced artist who knows how to handle paint.

All of the paintings seemed Richterian, but many had an Impressionistic, un-Richterian prettiness. Many looked too thought-out. Accidents looked intentional rather than discovered. His decisions stood out instead of taking me by surprise. Richter—who applies paint in scrims, in layers that emerge through one another—controls accident with a physical intelligence and subtle changes of direction and touch; his decisions are in an incredible call-and-response relationship to accidents. His abstract paintings look like photographs of abstract paintings. This creates glitches in your ­retinal-cerebral memory, so that you perceive this uncanny space between abstraction, accident, photography, process, the nature of paint, and painting. These didn’t.

Then, suddenly, one made my heart beat faster. Stanley grimaced. “That one’s not my best,” he said. “You’re wrong,” I told him. Then another struck me. He winced again… Then I understood that only when Stanley stopped thinking he was making a Richter could he make one”

(Jerry Saltz, “Saltz Challenges: Produce a Perfect Faux Gerhard Richter Painting, and I’ll Buy It”, Vulture, 25 November 2012)