Amorphous strokes of fiery red-orange seductively writhe and wriggle about the monumental canvas of Crash Course (Atalante) in improvised rhythm, compelling a mesmerizing visual experience that epitomizes Charline von Heyl’s celebrated practice. Familiar to the eye and yet evading clear classification, von Heyl’s paintings overturn long-held expectations of composition by cunningly rendering the picture plane into an elaborate junction for motley visual patterns. The present work is no exception: to follow the bright orange-red tangles superimposed atop the lenticular pattern of black and grey, our eyes must zigzag and crisscross throughout the abstract landscape of the composition. The present work debuted in von Heyl’s 2017 solo exhibition at Berlin’s Capitain Petzel Gallery, which “showed the flatness of modernist painting wrestling with the gridded and glowing smoothness of digital technology,” according to Mitch Speed. (Mitch Speed, “Special Berlin Gallery Weekend 2017, Mousse Magazine, 30 April 2017 (online)) In recent years, von Heyl has rose to international prominence as one of the most inventive contemporary artists, prominently exhibiting recently at the Central Pavilion in the 2022 Venice Biennale and at a major 2018-2019 museum survey Charline von Heyl: Snake Eyes, which travelled from the Deichtorhallen Hamburg to Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Belgium and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Mesmerizing and disorienting, Crash Course (Atalante) epitomizes the spellbinding visual vernacular that von Heyl has created to challenge the possibilities of painting, fearlessly stretching the t.mes less medium into unexplored and unpredictable terrain.

Part of the radical art scene in 1980’s Cologne, where she worked alongside the likes of Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, von Heyl playfully yet strategically teeters the boundary between graphic optical illusion and Abstract Expressionist painting. Across her illustrious oeuvre of abstract works, each a unique visual realm of their own, von Heyl references a visual epistemology ranging from the primordial lines of early cave drawings to the contemporary graphic patterns of digital imagery. Indeed, out of a seemingly infinite miscellany of visual shapes and painterly approaches, von Heyl assembles her own sense of order, configuring the canvas into an experimental playing field that begets new associations between aesthetic forms, new relations between object and spectator. The resulting perceptual effect is something akin to an optical exercise; as art historian Dirk Luckow explains:

The allure of Crash Course (Atalante) lies in the enticing interplay of discordant visual forms that contort across the canvas to achieve von Heyl’s ultimate painterly mission: “I don’t want to make the painting, I want the painting to invent itself and surprise me.” (von Heyl quoted in Mark Godfrey, “Stat.mes nts of Intent: The Art of Jacqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, Charline von Heyl,” ARTFORUM, May 2014 (online)) In the present work, distinct dual layers of white and black-grey undergird the forefront frenzy of red squiggles. Both, however, are spliced, collaged, and cut out in irregular shapes – including an abstracted face in the center, looking to the left – making it impossible to pinpoint which constitutes the true background of the image. A patterned layer of alternating black and grey bars establishes a scaffolding in the consistent repetition of its arrangement, forming a structured counterpart and balance to the twisting strokes of red. As with the very best of von Heyl’s paintings, Crash Course (Atalante) sees the artist skillfully destabilize the conventional aesthetic distinctions between foreground and background, positive and negative space, figurative and abstract, testifying her daring career-long inquiry into the two-dimensionality of the flattened picture plane.

Purely abstract, the graphic forms of Crash Course (Atalante) are devoid of symbolic meaning, and yet the present work seems to endlessly unravel with a profound exegesis that challenges the fundamental mechanics of painterly composition and perceptual optics. Such a sophisticated dichotomy epitomizes the exciting unpredictability of Charline von Heyl’s painterly practice, which radically arrives at the critical cornerstone of visual abstraction to test and tease the psychovisual capabilities of human sight. As writer Gaby Collins-Fernandez expounds, “In their incessant articulation and erasure of things and moves we recognize, von Heyl’s paintings let us relinquish the false binaries that litter our thinking of representation, of which none is more repeated or insidious than its implied opposition to abstraction. Rather, the works suggest that the two describe different parts of the same process. Abstraction, as insinuated by its etymology, drags what is nameable away from its usual surfaces. Representations confront us with our distance from the things we think we already know precisely by reminding us of them. This is also like a lenticular.” (Gaby Collins-Fernandez, “Charline von Heyl’s Paintings Treat Structure like a Game,” Cultured Magazine, 9 April 2019 (online))

ARTFORUM

Mark Godfrey, "Stat.mes nts Of Intent: The Art of Jaqueline Humphries, Laura Owens, Amy Sillman, and Charline von Heyl"

Artist

Charline von Heyl