This year, we saw a lot of circular die cuts deliberately disrupting both visuals and the book itself. — / BLAST / HEAT is one of the few books where this playful intervention adds something both to the image and to the object. In four places in this monography, works by Han Schuil appear in a four-page series, across the whole page. In each of these pages is a hole which, on the one hand, disrupts the work on the page in question, while on the other allowing this to be supplemented by a detail from the work on the page behind. Not only is this structure a nice complement to Schuil’s work, in which holes in objects (sitting somewhere between painting and sculpture) frequently occur, but these die cuts also mean that the eye is drawn to seemingly trivial portions of other works, inviting us to make connections as we leaf through.
The book is made up of two parts: a sleeve and a coverless interior. The choice of a sleeve is understandable given the lack of a cover and the vulnerable, die-cut pages. The jury were least impressed by the realisation of this specific sleeve, however. The interior, on the other hand, is highly successful: occupying a field of tension between total chaos and total control – imagine a compulsive loudmouth exerting extreme self-control. The lively, often also rigorous, material is captured by the book in exactly the right way. All in all, this book succeeds in doing what an exhibition in its ideal form strives to do: to create unexpected new connections and invite us as visitors/readers to enter into the work in our own ways.