Charline Von Heyl

Defenester, (2001)

Oil on Canvas

208.3 x 198.1 cm

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Defenester, (2001) presents a visual vortex of depth and space, as the title preserves symbolic meaning to describe a window. This may suggest that the painting acts as a translucent or transparent opening into the world. The artwork engenders the possibility of open interpretation, inclining a hiccup in perception when viewing the abstracted painting. The materiality emerges through many layers that were applied, and then erased, emerging an image and then declining the appearance. The painting almost hovers in front of itself between the viewer and the canvas, activating a relationship between the two. This conflict played out within the canvas, wrestles familiarity out of the frame. The viewer’s interpretation only leads the mind to chaos.

"Von Heyl draws with colour. Shapes that appear to overlap are, on close inspection, made from deepening the colour's value or carefully abutting different coloured shapes. Only sometimes is the painting tool a brush and gravity is a regular contributor to composing the image."  

Kaneda, S. (2009) After I was asked to do the mural. New York: Frieze Magazine. 

This quote that is taken out of a frieze article, gives me vision for the materials I am working with and how different pigments will associate with each other. Working with a similar process of butting together both geometric and fluid forms creates  an unbalance as the light organic form looks as though it is weight down. Gravity is another way of operating the material of water paint, when I leave the paintings to dry the paper can fold and bend through the process of drying and the water colour creates a spill down the paper which operated like a drip as through it was suppose to be there. 

Heyls process is like a tug of war between total isolation and reliance on what has come before is at the core of her practice. She proceeds to bury them in a vigorous two way process of destruction and creation in order to find that elusive thing, the 'new.'  I see my process a lot alike Heyl's as it is through this destruction and creation that my desired forms emerge from the surface. I have now learned to embrace failure with a new coat of paint. 

" The spatial leaps false starts and abrupt changes of direction or mood in these paintings create a sense of questioning and instability that keeps the view alert." 

I find this quote useful when making my own work as I see myself as both the painter and the viewer, I want the viewer to engage with the work as a similar way I do, standing up close so that your cloths almost brush the painting, the painting will start to become clearer when you gaze at the accumulated marks or pencil and incision cuts, or stepping back the works creates optical movement.

"The paintings become not so much a fight against outside elements as an elaborate and entertaining dance with the elements within." 

I see Von Heyls work not as an optical shift but as a layering or mix process', that causes an unpredictable outcome, a transformation as you have to spend time with the work to draw out the layers from underneath to try to visualise what the artist was thinking when making.

Von Heyl states in an interview with BOMB magazine in 2010 that her "paintings are often aggressively distant, through the refusing to play together with the beholder; they rather play with themselves in this self - satisfied way". 

I see this as a process of emergence as Jan Verwoert states: Emergence is a process of becoming where a material can reveal itself through a process of folding and unfolding on the surface of the canvas. I see Von Heyl's work in a similar way it is not just through the making, it is also through the viewing that these contingencies occur. "I don't want to make the painting,  I want the painting to invent itself and surprise me.