How are we to approach artworks which turn away from us, which close themselves off in relation to the gaze, create distance and withdraw into pure pictorial matter? These are the crucial issues that I will address through the strategies of withdrawal, muteness and silence epitomised through the use of grey in the work of two painterly practices: the early modernist, Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) and the late modernist, Gerhard Richter (1932). The primary and most striking feature of Hammershøi's paintings is a reductive colour scheme that manifests as a dominant grey tonality that permeates the work in and through a play of opaque surfaces. In Richter's oeuvre, grey is a recurring feature and way of thinking in painting that often manifests as either an all-over monochrome-like approach, or like pigment floating on blank screens. Although there are clear historical and aesthetic differences between the two practices, I want to explore how their respective approaches connect them through a passion for the distinct image that is expressed through the colour grey.

Central to my analysis will be Jean-Luc Nancy's post-phenomenological definition of art in terms of what he calls ‘the distinct’ (le distinct), which is defined as that which sets apart at a distance, silent, withdrawn, and thus where touch remains out of reach, detached and impalpable and which allows in-visibility to present itself without representing itself as such. Furthermore, I want to put Nancy's notion of ‘the distinct’ in conversation with Adorno's notion of ‘Verstummen’ as articulated in his Negative Dialectics, which translates into English as ‘silence’ or ‘muteness’. For Adorno, this ‘muteness’ is the sign of a world that can no longer be experienced because the world itself has lost its meaning and art is the exigent manifestation and preservation of this loss. Thus, this Adornian term echoes in strange and compelling ways with Nancy's claim that art is not a simulacrum that protects us from absence and loss, but a simulacrum in which the very revelation of loss is art's revelation as such.

In fact, in a piece entitled ‘Interviews’ in Multiple Arts: The Muses II, Nancy specifically uses the words ‘silence’ and ‘muteness’ when he notes that ‘(l)anguage is radically improper when faced with painting … Painting doesn't speak. There's a silence where painting's concerned, an absolute muteness.’