Heike-Karin Föll reminds us that portray is, to begin with, an artwork of constructing strikes. Of transferring between resolution and accident. Between including and subtracting. Quick and sluggish, silly and sensible strikes. Stopping, too, as a transfer. If we will’t assist pondering of the painter because the energetic supply or trigger of each work she indicators, we’re additionally reminded, in the meantime, that portray’s motor is always swept up in her personal strikes. At greatest, she’s their catalyst. Or extra like a mediator, or level of inflection. As a result of what’s put into movement, on this apply, should not solely supplies and colours however the painter herself. Colourful, liquid our bodies rising and forming within the midst of their very own actions: portray and painter. In Föll’s apply, portray is a physique that by no means stops materializing earlier than our eyes.

A collection of very small canvases approaches the lowered codecs of moveable tablets and cell phones. By bringing portray inside vary of such gadgets, Föll places portray into nearer dialogue with the unusual and diabolical temporality of the digital interface. The place does time go right here? If portray is an artwork of constructing strikes, it’s additionally a type of consideration to how materials strikes are at all times folded into lived, bodily time. Consideration to the truth that work are our bodies manufactured from dwelling time. The tiny canvas is like an interface that approaches the thickness and density of a factor on the earth, constructed of many encrusted layers and a number of, accumulating instances. However not like the interface, which solely disappears time, right here portray offers time its very personal physique. A resistant, plastic physique. Föll’s small, powerful canvases are thick with the time of their very own making, making their very own emergence vivid and actual. The marks and strikes that construct up these works are systematic once they wish to be. After which typically go towards themselves, additionally systematically. One layer obliterates one other, and it’s obliteration itself that turns into vivid, joyful and refreshing in these canvases.

The bigger works are achieved alla prima, which includes wet-on-wet portray, an artwork of first strikes and heightened reflexes. Right here portray accelerates. Scrawled passages of shade veer and wander between articulation and distraction. Generally we’re within the realm of almost-writing. In lots of works, Föll prompts the colour white in a method that remembers sure nervously luminous work by Berthe Morisot . . . a chaotic white that thickens the house of a second like paste. Some compositions are intentionally floral and garden-like: organized wildness after which wild order. Different works are extra instant and brutalist of their assault, and appear to channel the graffiti-like vitality of Fautrier, Twombly, Jorn.

The title Heike-Karin Föll is stamped onto some canvases: the writer as model as signature as mark amongst different kinds of marks, involving itself on this joyful system of move-making and obliteration. Like a motor, portray is a machine manufactured from movement. At a sure level, we lose the excellence between motor and movement. Composition turns into an impact of this. Colour is its pace.

—John Kelsey

at Weiss Falk Zurich
till July 15, 2023