Christine Heindl. The Milk Door is a Portal

About

Optically aggressive, yet tenderly constructed, Christine Heindl’s paintings suggest disorientation as a subject. Saturated primary and tertiary hues vibrate inside the engineered squares of a grid. From afar, it feels like an equation, but elements begin to delightfully slip the closer you step. Columns shift, rows are skipped, and sections follow their own rhythm. Heindl explains: “The patterns exist on a comfort/discomfort continuum - a sense of being neither there nor here, home or adrift.” Her interest in the grid contends with the nature of memory; she “re-collects” sensations of passing through doors and vestibules and pausing at mirrors reflecting patterned wallpapers, richly colored carpets, cabinets of multi-colored fabrics. She is fascinated with places that are in-between, like the tiny milk door in which the bottles were placed, neither inside nor outside a house, waiting for retrieval. Her work explores these incongruent or bewildering spatial sensations in relation to the activity of painting.

When Christine came to my studio, she asked if I had learned to write in cursive in school. I hadn’t, really­–I was taught the D'Nealian method–an in-between series of letterforms. She said it was a shame, and I agreed. The delicate looping lines that undulate over and around her gridded squares reveal an attention specific to her experience. Letter forms appear, too, and all of this adds a vulnerable touch to the graphic nature of the geometry.

Heindl’s work only fully reveals itself if viewed from multiple distances. The up-close is not the entire picture, and as you take in the full composition, you are missing the delightful details. We need work that operates outside of the Instagram-post grid. This grid is a system of slippage that marks time through the physicality of each decision.

Christine Heindl was born in Rochester, New York in 1960. She holds an MFA from Cornell University, and she has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Joan Mitchell Fellowship. She has exhibited her work in multiple venues, most recently at TURN Gallery, Project Art Space, Zurcher Gallery, and at NADA New York with Northern/Southern of Austin, TX. She lives and works in Queens.