Different kinds of incompleteness

different kinds – Inside the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a visitor’s gaze shifts from Gerhard Richter’s erased abstractions to the quiet, rigid work of museum protocol—an experience that turns into a larger meditation on how opacity, fragmentation, and refusal travel between art,

Walking through the Fondation Louis Vuitton this fall. the first thing I did was stare—almost obsessively—at Gerhard Richter’s paintings I knew by heart. As a young art student in Tehran. I’d trained myself to follow those blurred brushstrokes. to copy images from screens. to imagine what it would mean to stand before vast abstract surfaces that seem erased. washed back into uncertainty.

Now, in person, something felt off. Not because of Richter. Not because of the institution. Not even, in any simple way, because of the paintings. The distance came from a harder realization: different bodies are permitted to read a painting differently. And that permission changes what looking even is.

My attention kept returning to a young museum guard seated in one of the rooms. beside a large painted Pantone grid. He wore black. His expression looked uneasy. self-conscious—like he knew his presence was being processed by visitors whether he wanted it or not. Staring back at him was his job: to be functional. Regulated. Replaceable.

Watching him, I felt closer to that tense stillness than to the paintings’ invitation to prolonged looking. The room was staging an uneven economy of attention—one where certain entities are granted autonomy and others are tasked with maintenance and containment. The guard’s body was made legible before his thoughts ever had a chance to drift; the abstraction belonged to Richter. and the protocol belonged to the guard. That division didn’t stay neatly inside the museum walls. It leaked outward. into daily life—into bodies marked before they speak. into modes of being present without ever fully arriving. Looking, suddenly, no longer felt neutral. It felt like demand.

There’s a particular question you learn to fear when you’re an Iranian painter working in Europe. It may arrive politely—or sometimes not at all—but it hangs there like a question mark that nobody bothers to remove. But what does it say about your situation?. I see your work is abstract, layered, fragmented… but what’s happening in Iran?. What does this say about the situation there?.

You can feel how the inquiry works: it’s not just curiosity. It’s a pressure to convert art into explanation. I sometimes wonder whether the question comes from others or whether I’m echoing it back to myself. repeating a million fractured feelings of longing. guilt. belonging. and refusal. On better days, I manage an answer that feels less like defense and more like precision. The layers are not metaphors or covers. They are a lived method—what the painting moves toward. They’re about being seen and negotiating a demand.

That demand is the problem. Neutrality, the writer insists, doesn’t protect everyone equally. Neutrality protects those who already inhabit the canon. What’s at stake is the moment the interpretive frame snaps shut—one that claims to offer visibility while quietly stripping agency. The answer, for this practice, isn’t neutrality. It’s a refusal of wholeness.

The piece returns to that feeling through an image: a bowl that shattered in a suitcase last year. a bowl the author believed they had carried across borders safely. Its fragments still sit on a desk, taking up more space than the whole ever did. The thought of gluing it back together keeps turning up. and each time it does. it feels like a small violence. Restoring the original would deny what movement does to fragile things. The fragment tells a truth the whole never could.

That’s where the practice finds its commitment to visual and painterly language. What arrives on the surface does so from elsewhere—across borders. histories. and systems of legibility—and resists being made whole. Painting becomes the site where fragmentation and opacity are not problems to be solved, but conditions to be worked within.

In post-revolutionary Iran, visibility is inseparable from surveillance. To appear is to become legible to power. Under those conditions, opacity—through masking, layering, erasure, and withholding—is not framed as an aesthetic choice. It is described as survival, and as artistic agency. The painted surface becomes a threshold that determines what may be seen, by whom, and under what conditions.

After relocating to Europe, the terms of visibility shift again. Artists from the Global South are often expected to translate cultural and political experience into legible form. The essay points to Homi K. Bhabha’s ‘Signs Taken for Wonders’ (1985). where visibility operates through a colonial logic of intelligibility: to be seen is to be made knowable on someone else’s terms.

For the author, the practice doesn’t resolve that demand. It works within its own language.

Layering, in this account, doesn’t produce a neat final image. When the author layers a painting until earlier strata disappear. erasure isn’t described as reactionary. nor as a refusal staged for interpretation. The process begins with various image sources: images the author has engaged with throughout their practice. paintings by other artists. or fragments of older works. A first layer is built quickly using acrylics, then drawing and repainting follow. Pieces of masking vinyl cover parts of the surface so traces of previous layers remain visible in the next. These vinyls are reused until their adhesive fails. and over time they accumulate layers of paint from multiple works—carrying unconscious. accidental gestures.

Those vinyl fragments, the essay argues, become conceptually and formally significant. They produce texture, rhythm, and interruption within and between works. The process is described as mimicking the passage of time and the formation of memory—an ecosystem of incompleteness. where abstract patterns repeat. overlap. and partially resolve. The patterns can be read like a score or a text, inviting entry without guaranteeing comprehension. They mirror the world as it’s encountered: fragmented, layered, interpreted differently by each person.

The practice’s choices are also placed in a longer cultural archive of indirection, allegory, and veiling. Classical Persian poetry is cited, where meaning unfolds through layered metaphor. Sufi practices treat concealment as discipline. Linguistic structures reliant on inference and coded communication shaped by political precarity are also included. In that archive, erasure and opacity aren’t absences—they’re carriers of meaning.

Paint, as a material, is said to play a specific role: all layers remain present even when covered. Up close, the surface reveals accumulated time. The layers are described not as steps toward a final image. but as records of all the versions the painting could have been. That’s the reason given for working with paint: language demands conclusions, while paint does not.

From there. the essay turns to Chohreh Feyzdjou. naming the late-1980s as the period when she systematically blackened her own paintings. drawings. and objects using walnut stain. wax. and pigment. Earlier works were sewn together. rolled up. sealed in boxes. or stored in jars. then coated until their original surfaces became barely perceptible. The gesture. it says. has often been read symbolically. but its force lies in structural clarity: blackening doesn’t merely negate an image; it reorganizes the conditions of access.

What remains visible is described as a confrontation with certainty that something is present—and the impossibility of reaching it. Meaning shifts from recognition to duration: time spent lingering, returning, waiting for the surface to give something up. The surface no longer primarily serves transparency; it serves protection.

Feyzdjou’s black layer is described as a threshold producing a deliberate gap between object and gaze. That gap is said to be neither silence nor withdrawal. Opacity becomes containment. and the essay cites Julia Eckhard’s Verbergen. Umschließen. Vergraben (2023) as a “brilliant study” on Feyzdjou’s work.

Instead of presenting a unified oeuvre. Feyzdjou constructed a dispersed field of fragments. each marking a duration of studio time through the serial accumulation of drawings. paintings. and objects. Accumulated without resolution, incompleteness becomes a structural condition. In interviews, she is said to have likened covered works to memory: only partially accessible, never fully shared.

The essay includes a specific image reference: Tout art est en exil, Chohreh Feyzdjou, 1995. It also notes Musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, France, 2007, and an “Image by Josh Clark via Flickr.”

Earlier exhibitions are described in two steps. Scrolls remained rolled up while visitors watched filmed documentation of them. and most visitors never asked whether the scrolls could be opened. The strategy extended further in Buried Paintings (1994), which were documented in catalogues while being physically buried underground. Their existence was affirmed, but the images themselves were inaccessible.

Feyzdjou’s work is also described as informed by spiritual traditions, including Sufism and Jewish mysticism. Dissolution, in these traditions, signifies transformation rather than disappearance. Coating, darkening, and burial are presented as slow processes of breakdown and recomposition, where identity is dismantled rather than represented.

Institutional framing is another point of resistance. The essay recounts that when Feyzdjou was to participate in the contemporary art exhibition Heart of Darkness (1994-1995) at the Kröller-Müller Museum. she titled her installation I Don’t Agree With This Show. In the catalogue. she rejected the exhibition’s framing of exile and colonialism. insisting instead that her work belonged to an ‘imaginary and utopian universe of Man born into the World’. Exile is described as structural rather than geographic. Belonging remains unreachable.

The essay concludes by returning to its guiding question—what is permitted and what is demanded—this time with Richter as a pivot. The writer calls the conclusion “perhaps ironic,” because it’s an essay on incompleteness. Yet there are. the piece says. many kinds of incompleteness: transitional and imposed; inherited and reactionary; and chosen incompleteness. one that functions as a language of refusal.

With this framing, the question asked in front of Richter’s paintings shifts. It isn’t whether the author could ever paint ‘like that’. Like that is described not as a style but as a condition—one sustained by how some works are read and others interrogated. Opacity is permitted there, and biography can recede without being summoned back as explanation. That condition is said to be unequally distributed, shaped by how institutions, histories, and bodies intersect.

Although Richter’s work is acknowledged as deeply shaped by history and politics, it’s often perceived as operating independently from them. The possibility of such a reading is presented as unequally granted.

What remains available to the author, instead, is a different language of painting. Erasure reorganizes meaning rather than negating it. Layering and partial visibility carry the work’s conditions. Insisting on wholeness. the essay argues. may itself be a form of violence—a denial of the forces that fracture and unsettle. The surface becomes a record of negotiation rather than resolution.

The piece ends by stating: This article first appeared in Unfinished, Rekto:verso, 109 (spring 2026).

MISRYOUM culture news art criticism Gerhard Richter Fondation Louis Vuitton abstraction opacity incompleteness Iranian art Yasaman Nozari Chohreh Feyzdjou Heart of Darkness Kröller-Müller Museum Homi K. Bhabha Julia Eckhard Verbergen Umschließen Vergraben masking vinyl Pantone grid museum experience