Charline Von Heyl

Charline Von Heyl
Sabotage, 2009
13554-BK

11 1/8 x 14 x 1 1/2 in. (28.4 x 35.6 x 4 cm)

Rejecting both written language and illustration, Sabotage is a sort of image-text that gets straight to one of the book format’s most abstract possibilities: the material production of a sort of counterspace that exists beyond meaning. Interspersing transparent (Mylar) and opaque (paper) pages—a selection of the latter have been reconceived for publication here—Sabotage exploits the optical effects of superimposition while riveting the attention of its reader to the basic activity of turning pages. Isn’t this every book’s most intimate desire—to be ransacked and explored by fingers and eyes? Each turned page makes and unmakes the next, and the book remains in a state of constant optical transformation.

Stéphane Mallarmé, too, was fascinated by the fact that a book is above all an optical device—he even addressed the way a volume poses in the glamorous space of a shopwindow. With Sabotage, von Heyl invents something strange and ultimately unknowable with the purely material and energetic qualities of the book: surface and movement, ink and action. She lures the viewer into a readerly relation with her two-sided images. Frequently appropriating fragments of vintage comic books, found photographs, and other ready-made visuals, von Heyl layers and attacks these in such a way that they lose any illustrative function. Sabotage thus pursues a notion of abstraction as a process that resists representation, but that is also cunning and ironic enough to be able to picture itself—rampantly quoting aesthetic histories and styles, striking poses on the page. It is formalism exploiting its own power to leap from one content to another, reprogramming the book as a machine for producing surfaces.

The book has been printed in offset print by Arte-Print, Brussels on MAT. Blacklabel Silk 250gr MAT Magno Mat 400 gr and silkscreen printing by Screen Group, Brussels on transparent PVC 150 microns. Binding by Arte-Print, Brussels, Belgium and Laurel Parker, Montreuil. Slipcase on MAT Blacklabel Silk 150gr assembled by ” Les doigts qui rêvent “, Dijon. Format: 46 accordion pages and 23 free Mylar pages. Edition of 100 copies signed and numbered in arabic numerals from 1 to 100 and 17 artists’s proofs. This is copy #10 of 100.

Price Upon Request

Charline Von Heyl
Sabotage, 2009
6723-BK

The book has been printed in offset print by Arte-Print, Brussels on MAT. Blacklabel Silk 250gr MAT Magno Mat 400 gr and silkscreen printing by Screen Group, Brussels on transparent PVC 150 microns. Binding by Arte-Print, Brussels, Belgium and Laurel Parker, Montreuil. Slipcase on MAT Blacklabel Silk 150gr assembled by ” Les doigts qui rêvent “, Dijon. Format: 46 accordion pages and 23 free Mylar pages. 28,4 x 35,6 x 4 cm – (11,18 x 14,01 x 1,18 inches) Edition of 100 copies signed and numbered in arab numerals from 1 to 100 nd 27 artists’s proof numbered in roman numerals from I to XXVII. * this is an artist copy coming directly from the artist.

Price Upon Request