A reading of the Curated Content #2 group of images may require the passage over something that Maurice Blanchot calls the “empty deep.” The Richter Scale image in the group had been the cover for the Fall 2002 edition of dArt magazine, featuring author Bruce Bauman’s review of Gerhard Richter’s exhibition at the MoMA in New York. Bauman conceded that seeing the retrospective forced him to reevaluate why he wrote about art.

In the November, December and January canvases Richter reached transcendence. The huge, densely painted abstracts with their black and white layers with flashes of red and gold contain depth and fear, vibrate with the metaphysical dread and historical terror, which when merged with his near-perfect technical skills are awash in the death of the black rain of Hiroshima, the white night of the gulag, the sorrows of the drowned and the saved of Auschwitz. In these paintings, Richter finally lost his mind and found his soul. Only in those paintings did Richter touch me in the "empty deep." – Bruce Bauman