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arrow Arriving at SNL, February 2020. Jen Carlson / Gothamist There is a term in Portuguese, saudade, which my Portuguese-American sister-in-law tells me has no absolute English translation. But it is meant to describe a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one loves, according to Wikipedia, which also notes that, Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again. It s safe to say the feelings of saudade are all over the place right now as we hit the one year mark of life in pandemic times. And those final days lived in ignorant bliss are both a salve and melancholic trigger. ....
Gerhard Richter’s “Cage” suite of large paintings, commissioned for the 2007 Venice Biennale, are almost scenographic in sweep. The epic paintings are unabashedly theatrical, aggressively setting the stage for acute perceptual negotiation by a viewer. That the canvases are abstract rather than representational, as most painted stage scenery is, reflects just one remarkable feature of Richter’s achievement. The “Cage” series was included in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent survey, “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,” which opened and closed in eight days last March as the COVID-19 pandemic exploded in New York. The show, eagerly anticipated, was planned to travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art here late last summer but never made it a cultural casualty of the ongoing health crisis. ....