Charline von Heyl’s new exhibition at Petzel finds the artist furthering her engagement with semiotics. She is an abstractionist, albeit one who eschews the categorial delineation between the representational and non-figurative. Von Heyl’s pursuit is markedly distinct from the reflexive investigation of the conditions of painting’s possibility qua painting, prompted by the American abstractionists of the twentieth century. Her interests are equally removed from those that informed her Neue Wilde compatriots in the 1980s, preoccupied as they were with cartoonish Neo-Expressionism. Sidelining both medium-specificity’s impasto skeins and Neo-Expressionism’s penchant for narrative, von Heyl makes paintings that are exceedingly flat (she sands down her paintings to achieve this) and devoid of a vanishing point, hewing toward the line and its broad contours. Where she makes use of perspective, it is that of reverse perspective: her objects—a cascade of misshapen wine bottles, flower petals, raindrops—are generally portrayed in adumbrated outline or silhouettes, slowly descending or lightly buoyed. Von Heyl has often remarked that her gambit is to remain “ahead of language” and “create new images,” by which she seemingly means that her intention is to create novel configurations of images that are neither immediately recognizable nor have direct indexical referents with which to piece together a narrative. If meaning, in a loose sense, is to be found, it is not an unveiling but an associational practice, making von Heyl’s abstraction less painterly and more conceptual, concerned as it is with abstracting referents into the domain of meaninglessness.
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