Barbican, London
An ever-shifting new composition by Steve Reich is set to a Rorschach-like new film by Gerhard Richter, with wonderfully disorientating, hypnotic results
This collaboration between the New York composer Steve Reich and the German painter Gerhard Richter sees both of them stepping slightly outside of their respective comfort zones. Reich’s music is rather more nuanced and irregular than normal, while Richter’s contribution, made with film director Corinna Belz, is a slowly evolving piece of optical art projected on a large screen above the 14-piece ensemble.
Richter’s film is based on a 2012 book of computer-generated art called Patterns, which halved and mirrored his paintings to create kaleidoscopic images. As Reich’s music starts, the screen displays a series of horizontal stripes – like a Bridget Riley painting, or a piece of Missoni knitwear – which are gradually disrupted by vertical lines, creating fractal patterns. They keep subdividing, symmetrically, to the point where the image on the screen looks like a Persian rug, or one of those three-dimensional Magic Eye pieces, or a symmetrical version of one of Richter’s scraped and squeegeed abstract canvases. Ultimately the visuals start to resemble Rorschach blots, and the audience will start to impose their own connections between the audio and visuals.
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