Thomas J. Richter

Although Thomas Richter knows that it is quite futile, he holds fast to the left utopia and with an emotionally cheerful punctuation tries to mark a path that may lead through the confused acts of aggression of the real existing capitalist horror. He reckons unconcernedly autonomously that true communism has yet to come. 

Even if it is sometimes dark in his pictures - in Richter's extensive work there is a constant of inner brightness. And one may also call this degree of expectation and hope for the future his private pleasure. His pictures project an Arcadia spun with the present, at times reminiscent of a Czechovan, comic relationship panorama. But perhaps it is only the Friedrichshagen suburban idyll that smiles at us from this world. 

Sometimes this painter seems like the early Russian socialist and poet Alexander Herzen in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia, who, against all communist doctrines, believes: "History knocks at a thousand gates every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance." 

So what can be done in these circumstances? 
It is our lot to "go on, knowing that there is no landing on the shore of paradise. And to go on in spite of it." Like Camus' Sisyphus or Beckett's characters, who keep failing in order to fail better.