In her latest series, von Eichel continues to explore the tension between chaos and control, sense and senselessness, color and darkness. If paintings are the application of color to a surface, these works are not paintings but two-dimensional sculptures, with color manipulated by hand, pushed and pulled, coaxed and resisted by her hands, by the edges of pencils, by razor blades.
She has always pushed the boundaries of materials. In this case, she creates a layer of graphite on the entire plane before introducing oil pastels, which she then sculpts over the black surface, sliding the thick pigment, feeling and responding to its resistance. These surfaces then dry for months, before she adds more layers of color, another step away from the darkness underneath. And finally she carves and etches into the conflagration. At first glance, the work seems merely beautiful; upon further investigation, it is full of crags, of lines that, like energy, seem to form and disappear without direction.
The works are journals of anxiety, recorded over long spans of time. The terrifying force of a tornado’s wind, the oddly similar terror of gasping for air—her imagery records both sensations at once. External tragedies (violent conflicts, political unrest, climatic catastrophe) and internal struggles (the limits of the body, fears and hopes for her loved ones) swirl into a distinct language, so that each work becomes an essay on the ongoing desire to orchestrate the mayhem of existence into a contained portrait of color and pain.