Charline von Heyl, "Phoenix" (2008). Acrylic on linen, 82 x 74 in.

February 2009 Reviews

Tetsumi Kudo

Giorgio Morandi

Italics

White Columns Annual

Ari Marcopoulos

Lisa Sanditz

Omer Fast

Sarah Lucas

Jost Münster

Hannah Villiger

Vik Muniz

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Of the 30 works on paper that lined the first room of Charline Von Heyl’s solo debut in London (she’s shown extensively in the US), a text-filled example told you in an instant just how smart and funny is this New York-based German painter. In a style that falls between writing and painting — a kind of visual Sprechgesang — the artist jots down something about the importance of knowing when to stop. You can’t quite read the sentence, though, because von Heyl was unable or unwilling to apply the brakes, scribbling the sentence so that it disintegrates into incoherence. The work provides a commentary on its theoretical failure; yet, on a woozily formal level, it succeeds anyway. And so, with a flourish, we are plunged into the enlivening flux between intellect and emotion, intention and self-sabotage that characterizes the best that von Heyl has to offer.

Moving on to her paintings, I was disappointed only inasmuch as the five large-scale examples on show didn’t quite constitute the introduction hitherto distant admirers would like. Still, the emphatic but apparently unraveling graphic of Phoenix (all works 2008), Castle Keep’s crisp outline of cartoon crenellations breached by diffuse abstract calligraphy, and the bubble-like form that floats over a numbered grid in the mysterious Melancolia are fine examples of the artist’s fearless, freewheeling style, while the sparse elegance of the hang accentuates the hot/cold waft that makes von Heyl’s such a particular and enthralling aesthetic. "Charline Von Heyl" originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' February 2009 Table of Contents.