A closed museum can’t shutter these paintings’ digital life
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A strong exhibition of contemporary painting is up right now in the nation’s capital, but you can’t go see it.
That’s because the works by Charline von Heyl, the German-born New Yorker with a fearless approach to composition and style, are at the Hirshhorn Museum, which has been closed since the new year, a casualty of the government shutdown.
“Charline von Heyl: Snake Eyes” opened in November. Chances to see it are narrowing: The Hirshhorn is the only American stop for this show, which opened in Hamburg, Germany, last year, and the museum has no plans to extend its run past the Jan. 27 closing date.
So I’ve been thinking about what it means not to be able to see Ms. von Heyl’s paintings in person. I’ve been re-examining her art on my phone and on my bookshelf. What’s clear is that, unlike the other major exhibitions you also cannot see in Washington because of the shutdown, the “Snake Eyes” paintings bleed out of the gallery, into digital space.
Looking at a painting and looking at a digital image are hardly two discrete experiences anymore, especially for younger audiences. Being denied the chance to see Ms. von Heyl’s paintings in person can, if nothing else, clarify the bifocal strategies art like this demands of us and the ways painting can bridge the gallery and the screen.
Cunning, witty, dandyish at times, proudly kitsch at others, the paintings scamper over any distinction between “pure” abstract and figurative painting. They make use of graphical motifs such as stripes, grids, zigzags and squiggles, and luxuriate in a palette of warm colors: a muffled lavender, a lemon-chiffon yellow and a cherry-blossom pink that all, at times, get mucked up with gray.
Winding S-curves, jagged star bursts and stammering dots and dashes weave among more identifiable forms, from wine bottles to a woman’s face. And almost all of her recent paintings allow different kinds of mark-making — hard and soft, crisp and hazy — to intermesh in ways that trick, and thrill, visitors’ screen-conditioned eyes.
In “Dunesday” (2016), an impetuous curve divides the canvas between hard-edge, black-and-white zigzags at the top, and an inky, gashed field of saffron yellow at the bottom. Four outlines of bowling pins, and a fifth more like a toilet plunger, frame hot-colored patterns that interrupt the saffron half. Yet despite the work’s complex composition, all these elements seem to occupy the same flat plane.
The same holds true in “Mana Hatta” (2018), which blends rings, squiggles, polka dots and outlined bunny rabbits into what appears to be a figure in profile. The compositional elements bristle against one another, and still they somehow settle into a pancake-flat harmony.
Ms. von Heyl layers, blurs, masks and copies, soldering together parts into a single, solid image whose genesis is never quite clear. As Mark Godfrey and Andrianna Campbell have written, these painterly techniques are familiar from Photoshop, InDesign and other desktop publishing applications, whose users transform layers to produce a document or a JPG.
That’s what makes “Dunesday” and “Mana Hatta” so bewitching in the gallery: the back-and-forth between the means of composition and the resultant image, between the three-dimensional object on the wall and the two-dimensional impression it gives. They’re conversant with digital imagery, but they insist on the value of the handmade. And their layers resolve into images that would flummox earlier generations of abstract painters, but that we, as offspring of the screen, can dive into.
Ms. von Heyl’s paintings are relatively easy to photograph, and this week I have been looking at printed and digital images of her work, curious as to what disappears and what survives. Most of the visual tricks she employs get blurred, as when she uses masking tape to produce seemingly impossible tangles of lines. Scale drops out, too. Her paintings are usually between 6 and 7 feet tall, and in person they fill your eyes and badger your body.
Yet online images of her layered, digitally informed paintings aren’t fated to be mere shades of the “real thing.” The paintings on Instagram have their own lives, parallel to their lives in the gallery. Ms. von Heyl makes paintings whose graphic cohesiveness is something of a deception — and that effect is heightened on a phone’s OLED display, which turns the image into something close to an icon.
In the gallery, the pleasure of her paintings comes over time, as you look closely, unwind their parts, discover their inner workings. The pleasure online comes as the analog painting gets translated into something new, and disrupts our naive expectations of accurate transmission.
None of this is to say that social media offers a substitute experience to seeing these paintings in person. It is to say that, for many ambitious artists today, abstract painting springs from the ubiquity of digital imagery as well as from the history of art. These artists acknowledge that we look with compound eyes — and accept that a predigital painterly Eden will not come again.