An erasure of ‘Trample the Annuals’ (from the book “John the Posthumous” by Jason Schwartz)

20 x 18 inches
Acrylic (Interference colors) on linen
Collection of the Artist
Petzel New York

< Artists + Writers

Charline von Heyl, born 1960, lives and works in New York and Marfa, Texas

Somewhere in this painting, the artist tells us, is a phrase taken from Jason Schwartz’s puzzling book John the Posthumous (2013), which may or may not be an interior monologue capturing the imagined thoughts of an obscure French king. With that hint, we can make out the edges of words, parts of letters, as they peek out from beneath a blanket of smeared colors. This work is one of von Heyl’s “motto paintings,” small canvases containing pithy texts that the artist keeps around her studio for inspiration but rarely exhibits. The phrase, “trample the annuals,” occurs in chapter eight of Schwartz’s book, which can be read as a staccato catalogue of advice concerning agriculture and animal husbandry, or a prose poem written by a mind sifting through the relics of history. “Trample the annuals”— what every painter must do, for the sake of painting that refuses to be content with conventional beauty.

– Raphael Rubinstein, 2018