Question of erasure, an art of leaving out. Every painting, said Picasso, is a sum of destructions: the artist builds and demolishes in the same instant. Which is perhaps what Jasper Johns had in mind when he said of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing1953 that it embodied an ‘additive subtraction’: after a month’s sporadic destruction, and 40 spent erasers, what is left is a surface startlingly alive, active, palimpsestic.

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What the eye picks out as meaningful on a printed or marked surface is mostly down to learning and convention: the legible text or image floats free of the surrounding remnants of abandoned language, meaningless doodles or flaws in the texture of the flat support. The real message hangs in the air like a street full of neon. Still, there is something seductive about the idea of an erased truth lurking between the lines.

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In 1845 Thomas De Quincey, who had earlier written that ‘there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind’, described the submersion of experience in memory precisely as a text erased and overwritten. Like its written counterpart, the ‘palimpsest of the human brain’ will one day reveal its secrets to the chemical wash of involuntary memory. Erasure, it turns out, is just a particularly profound form of preservation.

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This erasure mechanism is applied in paintings as well. - A painting is both thick and thin at the same time – its physical extension supports its surface flatness, which in turn suggests a notional depth. A painting – at least a figurative painting – which is, as it were, too deep, risks becoming a glutinous mess, erasing itself by its very urge to completion. This sort of intercession of authority is commonly seen in its written counterpart, and was often adopted by the novel of eighteen century, in which, due to the expunged words, readers were invited to imagine undescribed erotic adventures, on the blacked-out pages of classified documents, or in the cancelled lines of a prisoner’s censored letter.

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In figurative painting, makers like to blur the facial details on objects. more than any other image, an erased human face remains horribly eloquent. In fact, a face cannot be made to vanish completely: it stays sufficiently horrify by its exact lack of humanity. this sense of horror  is produced by silence which we require in a painting by stripping out all unnecessary parts, then this silence requires the image to go on talking.  so what I draw from this paragraph is that vanishing elements can be a way of adding more invisible information.

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To give an example, from Gerhard Richter's painting we can find that the technique of scraping and vanishing has clearly narrowed the gap between the certain kinds of abstract picture that does not affect our image behind it or the image in mind and picture that does.