Daniel Richter is known for shifting back and forth between abstract and figurative painting within individual pictures, as well as for the predominance of one or the other in ­different periods in his career. For his fourth edition for TEXTE ZUR KUNST, he has chosen a motif that exemplifies this aspect of his art. The scene is set in a woodland landscape rendered in gestural strokes of blue and green paint. The viewer witnesses an encounter between two hazy figures, as seen from the edge of a sandy clearing. One, naked, lolls at the center, while the other, clad in a reddish dress, approaches from the left. If art history’s male-dominated visual axes initially suggest that we are joining a ­voyeur’s gaze upon a female nude, we soon realize that here the roles are reversed. It is not nature that the nude is reveling in with self-abandonment but – his legs twisting above his head in ecstasy – his own self. On the formal level, the gestural and motoric pleasure of the act of painting cuts across an individualized and existential wrestling with body and form that brings to mind Francis Bacon. Derived from an untitled medium-format painting created in 2013, the motif becomes an ambivalent image that oscillates between the idyll of an Impressionist landscape and the autoerotic gratification at its center. The “dangerous supplement” that, to follow Jacques Derrida’s reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, supplants nature’s immediacy with its deceptive likeness becomes a hinge in this painting that enables Richter to cater to the viewer’s positive and negative expectations at once.