Archive, remédiation, histoire : pour revenir sur peinture et photographie

The paper discuss the idea of Remediation through the analyses of a Photopainting by German artist Gerhard Richter. The core idea of the article is that the intermedia montage of different media 'forms' can enhance the witnessing power of the work of art confronted to issues of traumatic memory. In particular, the paper argues that the portrait of the artist's uncle in his Wehrmacht uniform transcends the biographical issues and constitutes a form of visual thinking about some main devices of the Nationalsocialist power. The analyses of such a 'visual thinking' is brought on through the paradigm of a so-called 'plastic semiotics' and, more generally, through visual semiotics.