What struck the panel first about this book is the printing process: the printing has been done with a Risograph, a kind of stencil duplicator that needs special ink. This, in combination with the paper, produces a velvety effect and a unique visual and tangible feel that is perfect for Frieling’s art.

The book was published on the occasion of an exhibition in the Cobra Museum and Frieling’s award of the Cobra Kunstprijs Amstelveen. In Amstelveen Frieling created a large installation, a painted room in the museum, as he has elsewhere. His work evokes an exotic world full of animals and plants and colourful paradisiacal scenes with elements of vernacular painting and other iconographic sources. In a way that is as effective as it is unpretentious the book offers us a window into this world full of ornaments and decorations, helped by Job Wouters with his hand-painted and hand-drawn lettering.

The result does handsome justice to the layeredness and tactility of Frieling’s work. In its design and execution the book underlines the casual and ephemeral nature of Frieling’s murals. At no point does it become top-heavy – despite being an overview of his oeuvre – and at every point the sense of the manual labour that went into the work is made tangible.