Paintings 1990-2010

Franck Gautherot
The Chocolate Grinder
Introduction
(p. 6-8)


Painting has become both central (due to markets and fortunes) and marginal in the field of contemporary art.
She lacks visibility in the “grand curator” biennales and exhibitions. Yet she is present, in countless studios and galleries, often impossibly dreadful, always playing tricks, rarely surprising.
When she displays herself majestically before us, with assurance, with the pretension to pick up where the Renaissance had convinced her of perfection and signified the absolute, she reinvents once again the only question that can possibly be: what action to set in motion… Not what content, not what method, not with which signs, not with which pose, not with what idea... but how to decide the act of painting here and now, after the mess, the History and the odious memories of masterful compositions.
For this book, Charline von Heyl has assembled paintings made on the old and the new continent: in Germany at the beginning of the 1990s and in New York since 1996.
In Germany:
To find a place in a painting scene principally tied up in deconstructionist questions with painting itself was not the least of her challenges. Somewhere in between several recent histories of the 1980s – the Neue Wilde had mildly spoiled the territory and their immediate successors, the absurd ironists Kippenberger and Oehlen, as well as the non-practising iconoclast Michael Krebber – Charline von Heyl's paintings lock onto success, avoiding direct quotations or over considered compositions, in favour of a bold assemblage with hints of figurative, decorative and/or just materials.
Moving to New York in the middle of the 1990s... she is fully aware that the matter (of painting) would have to be couched in the midst of the vestiges of another abstraction – the American one.
Painting is neither asceticism nor spectacle; it requires gestures and techniques and feeds off recipes and creativity even though listening to painters' jargon about the complexities of varnish and transparencies is an ordeal.
Charline von Heyl's painting never has time to become a cliché, since she has learnt to be where she could never go even if she really wanted to. Should she want to, she wouldn't be able to. She claims to want to make newness with newness since she can't enter the memory of the brush – which, like water, is shamanic and full of energy.
The tension she conjures up requires so much attention and spontaneity that she would not be able to follow a simple method or apply readymade recipes. In any case, she announces this intention which isn't devoid of courage or grandeur. She will pursue the difficult route of tackling a new history every day.
Time is in her favour: it simplifies her project, suggesting she gives the best of herself constantly; preventing her from the routine of a programme to follow that would become weighty and tedious; giving her History as pasture, to pick at without pretending; handing over the burning freedom to say: « hang on, wait a second, I know all this, but I am going right there... where everyone has already been, but I will be the first anyway... »
The book of lined up paintings, spread just about chronologically, is the first to really hold forth since it observes the paintings from a dual point of view: the rather objective colour reproduction with margins vis-à-vis the more determining and selective extract (far more than a detail) which is magnified, in black and white, and manipulated by the artist revealing the graphic structure of the paintings.
What happens when colours fall off the next page and a large starkly black and white surface only reveals a perfectly cropped extract? Suddendly the paintings are stripped to the bones, in uncomfortable close-ups, they unveil their structure. This becomes inevitably graphic but as it is followed through systematically throughout the entire body of work, it creates a syntax.
Her limited edition artists' book Sabotage (1) already explored similar processes, toying with zooms, symmetries, superimpositions... – which highlights the process without removing the pleasure of the face to face confrontation with the actual painting.