Charline von Heyl
Twenty/Twenty V (2020)
Not unlike Frans Masereel’s woodcuts or Lynd Ward’s so-called wordless novels, the edition Charline von Heyl has created exclusively for “Texte zur Kunst” exemplifies the compositional sophistication that the fine art print shares with painting. The abstract and mostly black-and-white silkscreen print’s title, “Twenty Twenty V,” is a reference to perfect vision, or the ability to see clearly without the aid of glasses or corrective lenses. On the other hand, the title takes note of the utterly extraordinary year 2020 with its unprecedented challenges and the peculiar moods that the coronavirus pandemic has prompted. Fittingly, some of the shapes in the picture may be read as the digits “2020” while the composition as a whole is reminiscent of a kind of eye test with jumbled characters. In that sense, “Twenty Twenty V” is a vision of its own kind, anticipating a future whose contours are hard to make out.