Charline von Heyl at Petzel, Deichtorhallen

(Petzel, Deichtorhallen)

No longer devotionals of ab-ex maybe not only because they draw from advertising and cultural chutzpa at large, but because they are dishonest. The impressionist showed the strokes that the Academy would have buffed and, winning the historical argument, paintings ever since have performed this honesty as Truth. Which these don't suggest any cathedral of Truth. Instead just sorta flip-out, covering and masquerading a can-can, like a painting in slow state of clonic seizure, and gesticulation as a sort of cerebral-visual paradox, optical illusion, disguise. What Kelsey called Big Joy could also be a state of mania, or anxious outburst, like seeing your friend on amphetamines and wondering what about his personality you liked in the first place. Abstraction is the friend in this metaphor. Because these paintings are brutal. I keep coming back to their somehow relation to the FEED, to the anxious state of transitionary image, of scrolling. "painterly recognition that is particular, depleting, and manic." People love these and I could stop talking about them if someone would write that their praise, that what we are all enjoying, is the delirious feeling of being struck in the face with air. Your eyes are a pillow and these things like fists.


See too: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain, Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel

Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel

(link)

It was important that within the slurry of Post-war abstraction's melting of representation remained the church-like atmosphere from which western painting stemmed: devotional painting still. If von Heyl's is different it's because the paintings trade this devotional for the more transactional address of advertorial cymbal crashing, of images striking, with attack, no slurry but legibility, recognition, even if recognition is nonsense, abstraction, just that you see its information.


see too: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain

Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain

(link)

Von Heyl's paintings are striking, like being struck, designed with the force of icons and logos, instantaneous recognition, the paintings connect with a speed prophetic of the contemporary and understandable that her rise delayed would coincide with that of digital networks: von Heyl's paintings turn composition into a kind of semio-transaction of consumption, a painterly recognition that is particular, depleting, and manic. Like scrolling through a feed. Von Heyl is one of the few painters (image makers) seeming to understand and frame what it feels like to look at (consume) images today, emptying.