By Peter Plagens Dec. 18, :36 p.m. ET

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1 = Charline von Heyl in 2018 CHARLINE VON HEYL/PETZEL, NY/RALPH MECKE (PHOTO) By Peter Plagens Dec. 18, :36 p.m. ET Washington Charline von Heyl, the German-born (1960) abstract painter who splits her working time between New York and Marfa, Texas, is nothing if not inventive. The difficulty with her everything-but-the-studio-sink approach (within the conventional bounds of the flat, canvas rectangle) is that one has to be a genius on the order of Pablo Picasso or Louise Bourgeois to really pull it off. That is, for the work to be profound and moving instead of merely clever and entertaining. This exhibition, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, of over 30 paintings from 2005 to the present Ms. Von Heyl s largest U.S. 456 W 18th Street New York NY & 35 E 67th Street New York NY Tel Fax info@petzel.com

2 museum survey to date is more impressive than likable, more show-offy than poetic. One suspects that this is rather how the artist wants it. Our hesitancy is reinforced by the show s subtitle, Snake Eyes, which to the ordinary viewer refers to an unlucky, impoverished roll of the dice, but to the artist connotes the ever-deceitful nature of vision. Ms. Von Heyl prefers a format in the 80-by-70-inch range, perhaps because the near-tosquare proportions rein in a little her exuberant semi-chaos. The installation, spread over several galleries, is spare and likewise lends coherence to what could have been a kind of painterly cacophony. It was done by the artist herself, as was the design of the show s two-volume catalog; Ms. Von Heyl is also nothing if not a pro. She knows all the tricks of the trade, from variegated paint-handling, to getting an Op Art perceptual wiggle, to when to leave raw linen showing to demonstrate how creatively her pictures have come up from nothing, to making a grid perform as an overunder weave and prodding the color red to glow like neon by surrounding it with black. A wall label points out that even what looks like collage is in reality carefully painted. Charline von Heyl s Solo Dolo (2010) PHOTO: CHARLINE VON HEYL/PETZEL, NY

3 When Ms. Von Heyl is on, she s on. Solo Dolo (2010) is one of the best and maybe even the best painting in the exhibition a complex manipulation of both of space (the weird bulging of a harlequin pattern) and color (an offbeat combination of beige, a strangely dead pink, and black). The title, by the way, means doing something down low by oneself a perfect two-word summary of Ms. Von Heyl s braggy yet selfeffacing attitude toward the queen of the arts. Killersmile (2011) is almost as good, in an entirely different way; a kind of offhand fence of homely light- and medium-brown vertical lines is punctuated, on the far right side of the painting, by a thin horizontal black blade that seems as physically emphatic as an actual slice in a canvas by the Argentinian- Italian painter Lucio Fontana. Charline Von Heyl s Killersmile (2011) PHOTO: CHARLINE VON HEYL/PETZEL, NY

4 Artistic allusions and nods are, however, where Ms. Von Heyl s unrelenting cleverness starts to feel like a burden. Melencolia (2008), for instance, is said in the wall text to be inspired by Albrecht Dürer s 1514 engraving of the same title, and by Jan van Eyck s convex mirror in his masterpiece Arnolfini Portrait from 80 years previous. If that isn t enough, the brushily Arnolfini-esque central circle halfway obliterates a grid of numbers that, if fully visible, would constitute Dürer s magic square in which any complete row adds up to 34. One also sees throughout the show references to Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Sidney Nolan, as well as such contemporaries of Ms. Von Heyl as Carroll Dunham and George Condo. One painting, Poodle Pit (2006), is almost a brown n serve Hans Hofmann; all it needs are a couple of bright, palette-knifed rectangles floating on that sienna sauce to qualify as one of the famous push-pull Abstract Expressionist s typical late-1950s pictures. Installation view of Charline Von Heyl: Snake Eyes at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden with Painting (2006) and Melancolia (2008) PHOTO: HIRSHHORN MUSEUM AND SCULPTURE GARDEN, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

5 Perhaps if Ms. Von Heyl were more irreverent, if she risked along the lines of Julian Schnabel s white-blob paintings thumbing her nose not only at the convention of consistency from one picture to the next in abstract painting, but at the current fashion of putting whatever floats your boat into every single painting, her work would have less of an art-savvy display of facility and more emotional oomph. On the other hand, Snake Eyes does prompt turn-and-turnabout thoughts on the part of the viewer. Ms. Von Heyl is a ridiculously talented abstract painter. She can produce on canvas just about anything she wants, and almost all of it is, at the least, visually arresting. The 10 paintings with explanatory wall labels would be, to my mind, perfectly self-sufficient without them. A docent strolling through the galleries when I saw the show said that the labels were a negotiated compromise between Ms. Von Heyl who d prefer a cold read, as they say in the theater and the curator who reasonably felt that a general audience could use a little guidance. Suffice it to say that Snake Eyes puts a lot to think about on the museum s walls, and that the exhibition does manage to get better the longer one looks at it. Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York. Appeared in the December 19, 2018, print edition as 'A Painting Pro in Need Of Poetry.'