Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Charline von Heyl is not an ordinary abstract painter. And frankly, she couldn’t care less about your narrow categories, your little comfortable boxes where you put artists just to sleep better at night. Born in 1960 in Mainz, raised in Bonn, trained in Hamburg then Düsseldorf before conquering New York in the 1990s, von Heyl is that rare creature who refuses stylistic coherence as an intellectual prison.
I have watched her for years, this artist who acts like a visual pirate, pillaging art history without remorse or excuses to create works that grab you by the collar and refuse to let go. To quote Susan Sontag: “True art has the power to make us nervous” [1]. Von Heyl pushes this nervousness to provoke what she herself calls a “visual mindfuck,” without ever falling into the ease of gratuitous subversion.
Look at “Mana Hatta” (2017), where silhouettes of hopping rabbits cross the lower part of the canvas. Red dots reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein fill their bodies and reappear here and there in the composition. Splashes of red and concentric circles evoking the vibrating discs of Robert and Sonia Delaunay and the targets of Jasper Johns create other visual and historical equivalences. Everything seems to swirl and overlap in what could be interpreted as a head, a motif that seems to suggest, as one of Walt Whitman’s poems does for the individual and for the United States, that the painting contains myriads.
Here comes a first concept that runs through von Heyl’s work: metamorphosis. According to Ovid, a first-century Latin poet, metamorphosis is the process where “bodies transform into new bodies” [2]. His Metamorphoses tell how beings transform under the effect of extreme emotions, divine intervention, or extraordinary circumstances. Von Heyl applies this logic to painting itself. Her works exist in a state of permanent transformation, where shapes seem captured at the precise moment of their mutation.
Take “Lady Moth” (2017), where a network of black lines serves as scaffolding for ice-blue and lavender forms, each bearing a pattern of dripping paint that pushes against the precise contours of the shape. At the center of the work, the simplified silhouette of a butterfly is rendered in a modulated black that suggests chiaroscuro and gives the shape an impossible solidity. As in Ovid’s tales, von Heyl’s transformations are never complete; they remain suspended between two states, betraying their origin while revealing their destination.
This tension between transformation and stasis is fundamental to understanding von Heyl’s artistic approach. As she stated in a 2010 interview with Bomb Magazine: “What I try to do is create an image that has the iconic value of a sign but remains ambiguous in its meaning. It’s not about mystifying anything, it’s about extending the time of pleasure. Or torture” [3].
In “Corrido” (2018), the central part of the canvas lights up with overlapping purples and greens. Repetitive curves, overlapping and echoing each other, seem to dance on the canvas, uniting flat patterns, long feathery brushstrokes, and dripping washes. Her paintings are less representations or abstractions than visual events unfolding in the time of our gaze. They stage what philosopher Henri Bergson called “duration,” that subjective experience of time that stretches or contracts according to our emotional involvement [4].
Bergson distinguished the time of clocks, mechanical and divisible, from lived duration, fluid and indivisible. “Pure duration,” he wrote, “is the form taken by the succession of our states of consciousness when our self allows itself to live, when it refrains from establishing a separation between the present state and earlier states” [5]. Von Heyl’s compositions embody this Bergsonian duration; they reject linear reading, superimpose different temporalities, and transform the gaze into an experience.
How else to explain that her works seem to simultaneously contain both the history and the future of painting, as if pictorial time had folded back on itself? In “Dial P for Painting” (2017), a sketched rotary phone sits in the lower right corner of a bright yellow field. This Hitchcockian reference, twisted, is more than a wink; it is an invitation to dial a number, to establish a connection with painting as an ancestral yet always living medium.
Art critic Alan Pocaro wrote about her “New Paintings” exhibition at the Corbett vs. Dempsey gallery: “These rapid changes and singular juxtapositions are ultimately what is best about von Heyl’s paintings. Their ability to transcend the cultural priorities of the moment (superficiality, fleeting pleasure, and rapid consumption) while undeniably being part of the discontinuous zeitgeist that gave birth to them is unmatched among her peers” [6].
This brings us to the second concept I associate with von Heyl’s work: synesthesia, that neurological phenomenon where the experience of one sense automatically triggers an experience in another. In his treatise On the Soul, Aristotle already raised the question of how different sensory perceptions combine to form a unified experience, which he called the “common sense” [7]. Although synesthesia as a medical condition was only identified in the 19th century, its artistic exploration was fundamental to modernity.
Von Heyl pushes this exploration to its peak. Her paintings simultaneously evoke the tactile (texture), the visual (color, line, form), and even the auditory (rhythm, dissonance, harmony). “Color harmonies have something poetic or musical, which I find increasingly interesting to study and manipulate,” she confides [8]. In “Ghouligan” (2020), the interweaving of rounded and grid-like feathers that seem digitally rendered in acrylic, oil, and pastel on raw linen creates a truly synesthetic experience where the boundary between seeing and feeling blurs.
This approach recalls the experiments of the poet Arthur Rimbaud in his sonnet “Vowels”, where he assigns colors to vowels: “A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue” [9]. But whereas Rimbaud sought a fixed correspondence, von Heyl embraces fluidity and instability. Her paintings do not propose a system of correspondences but an experience of sensory destabilization.
What is particularly striking about von Heyl is her ability to convey this synesthesia through an extraordinary diversity of pictorial means. Each painting is a world unto itself, with its own rules, its own physics, its own visual chemistry. “In ‘Vel’, one might forgive a viewer enchanted by the frenetic orange-red brushstrokes and the gray Hofmann-like slabs to conclude that the candy-colored palettes and still-life imagery in ‘Bog-Face’ belong to entirely different artists,” Pocaro further notes [10].
Through her works, von Heyl rehabilitates what had been abandoned by late modernism: thoughtful design, seductive color, and passages of figuration that are not afraid to be called kitsch. But she does so without nostalgia, without easy irony. As she herself explains: “Kitsch is not ironic in the way I use it. Kitsch, to me, means a raw emotion that is accessible to everyone, not just someone who knows art” [11].
In “The Language of the Underworld” (2017), von Heyl presents a repeated disembodied head that watches over stacks of shapes and cryptic, largely illegible notes. Among those decipherable, three read: “[W, ] the Posthumous”, “Rome [upon?] Rome”, and “Handsome Little Shadows!”. Painting is always about building Rome upon Rome, the new and the old casting tangled shadows impossible to unravel, inevitably advancing because time moves forward.
In “Poetry Machine #3” (2018), von Heyl pays tribute to Emily Dickinson, whose profile appears in three of her works. It is no coincidence that she chooses this reclusive poet who, in the isolation of her Amherst home, found a space to dwell beyond the finitude of her environment. Her isolation was deceptive, for she found infinity in a finite space and valued the breadth of human thought and creativity. Her verses resonate with a distinctly “heylian” ethos:
“The Brain, is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, Blue to Blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As Sponges, Buckets, do” [12]
What does von Heyl do if not invite us to dive into the deep seas of painting, knowing that we will never reach the bottom?
In “Bunny Hex” (2020), the ghostly forms with wide-open eyes that appear dusty pink when viewed head-on become gray when seen from the side, the painting turning monochrome from that angle. The effect evokes a lenticular image, the palette change transforming the painting’s atmosphere to the point that it seems to depict something entirely new.
Von Heyl’s relationship with art history is equally complex. She borrows elements from various sources, Cubism, Informal Art, Minimalism, graffiti, to name just a few, approaching the history of painting since modernism as if it were a toolbox, a set of tropes and techniques available to be strategically deployed when they meet the demands of a given composition.
Her approach recalls certain observations by Vladimir Jankélévitch on irony: “Irony is the keen awareness of the dialectic opposing appearance to reality […] It carries within itself the principle of its own destruction, but also of its perpetual rebirth” [13]. von Heyl’s paintings are deeply ironic, not in the sense of cynical detachment, but in their keen awareness of the contradictions inherent in the act of painting in the twenty-first century.
And yet, there is a palpable joy in her work, a celebration of the unlimited creative potential inherent in painting. Often, the brushed, colored, and textured backgrounds of her works are brought to the forefront by matte black stencil geometric patterns, sometimes in the form of raindrops, a frame, or stars. These layers give the impression of not resting on the canvas but standing in front of it, like a kind of barrier at the entrance. But like any closed door, it comes with a challenge to enter, to step out of the gallery space and into the painting, a place where anything can happen.
Without spelling it out, von Heyl defines what a painting is: a fantastic world in which we can indulge in tumultuous colors and the endless inventiveness of two-dimensionality. By delimiting the space between the gallery and the painting, she transforms its surface into an asset. She almost seems to say, “what we are dealing with here is a superstructure, but isn’t it fantastic?”
Often, the “purpose” of art is obtuse, but we know it is necessary. By clearly evoking those who preceded her such as Picasso and Robert and Sonia Delaunay (in “Hero Picnic” and “Mana Hatta” respectively), von Heyl lets us know that we are looking at Art with a capital A, but she adds her own playful overlays to draw attention not only to her paintings as paintings but rather to the absurd pleasure there is in looking and reflecting on one of them.
All painting is fantasy, from Delacroix to Kahlo, and if a canvas reminds us of this fundamental element, we can all the more appreciate the magic. The expansiveness of this kind of art is not limited to painting, of course, and the evocation of Emily Dickinson, whose profile appears in three of the works, is a testament to the same kind of universality accessible from the limited.
“I am interested in artists who are considered second-rate, or third-rate, because they touched on something, but then they get stuck repeating themselves,” von Heyl said [14]. This insight is perhaps part of von Heyl’s determination not to repeat herself. It is often said about her work that each painting is completely different, a world unto itself.
And yet, of course, there are things that unify the work: her taste, her way of handling color, the way the scale of the paintings derives from the size of her gestures. All these things are part of what she calls “a bit of the common thread that runs through,” which I take to mean the continuity that comes from her singular hand: her singular self.
In the era of social media and fragmented attention, von Heyl offers us works that demand and reward sustained engagement. Her paintings are slow-downs in a world that values speed and efficiency. They remind us that art does not need utilitarian justification; its value lies precisely in its ability to create spaces of experience that escape market logic.
What truly sets Charline von Heyl apart is her categorical refusal of artistic dogmas, whether old or new. She is neither a nostalgic traditionalist nor an avant-gardist determined to break with the past. Rather, she occupies what art critic Rachel Wetzler calls “a position of resistance to dominant trends” [15]. This position is not defined by opposition, but by a positive affirmation of artistic freedom.
And isn’t that exactly what painting needs today? Not more theory, more irony, or more sincerity, but simply more daring, more curiosity, and more joy in the very act of painting? Von Heyl shows us that the future of painting does not lie in seeking a new path after the presumed end of art history, but in the endless exploration of possibilities that have always been inherent in the medium.
So next time you see a work by Charline von Heyl, take your time. Let your gaze wander over the surface. Allow your perception to change over time. And perhaps, just perhaps, you will discover that the brain is really deeper than the sea.
- Sontag, Susan. “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays, 1966.
- Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book I, lines 1-2, 1st century.
- Von Heyl, Charline. Interview with Bomb Magazine, 2010.
- Bergson, Henri. Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, 1889.
- Ibid.
- Pocaro, Alan. “Curiously Confounding: A Review of Charline von Heyl at Corbett vs. Dempsey,” Newcity Art, February 10, 2021.
- Aristotle, De Anima, Book III, 4th century BC.
- Von Heyl, Charline. Interview with Jason Farago, EVEN Magazine, 2018.
- Rimbaud, Arthur. “Vowels,” Poems, 1883.
- Pocaro, Alan. “Curiously Confounding: A Review of Charline von Heyl at Corbett vs. Dempsey,” Newcity Art, February 10, 2021.
- Von Heyl, Charline. Interview with Jason Farago, EVEN Magazine, 2018.
- Dickinson, Emily. Poem 632, “The Brain is Deeper than the Sea,” 1863.
- Jankélévitch, Vladimir. Irony, 1964.
- Von Heyl, Charline. Interview with Jason Farago, EVEN Magazine, 2018.
- Wetzler, Rachel. “Charline von Heyl,” Art in America, December 1, 2018.
