Joan van Barneveld. Into Longing, Vast Rock

Book coverJoan van Barneveld. Into Longing, Vast Rock
Book coverJoan van Barneveld. Into Longing, Vast Rock
Book coverJoan van Barneveld. Into Longing, Vast Rock
Book coverJoan van Barneveld. Into Longing, Vast Rock

On a first superficial acquaintance this book gives the impression of being a photo book full of grainy black-and-white urban landscapes printed in deep black. Closer inspection reveals that the artist Joan van Barneveld paints with acrylic on canvas as well as being a screenprinter and photographer: here we have some series of paintings of shadows on pavements, a section of photographs of an abandoned attic room, a series of deep black paintings in which, when you look long enough, an after-image in blue appears, and some desolate landscape screenprints entitled Postcards from the Edge.

 

The book’s designer Geoffrey Brusatto has endowed it with the same kind of alienating atmosphere by placing the four series of works in sequences containing a great deal of unevenly distributed blank space, with no further captions, and by treating the explanatory texts as separate reading sections. Van Barneveld is interested in the culture of pop and grunge and according to the texts is working on amor vacui, i.e. the love of empty space, the sublime contrasted with the mundane, and the desire to disappear. Even without this explanation the book succeeds in expressing these uneasy concepts. The panel had difficulty deciding how to approach this contrary book and offered contradictory arguments in its assessment, but at the same time felt a sense of excitement when contemplating its idiosyncratic design, the intractable character of the work – consistently extended to the ordering, the decision to use uncoated paper, the beautiful grey and black-in-black printing, and the remarkable arrangement of text and image.

Edition: 2014
Language: English, translated by Mels Dees
Final editor: Freek Lomme
Publisher: Onomatopee, Eindhoven
Designer: Geoffrey Brusatto
Lithographer: Lecturis, Eindhoven
Printer: Lecturis, Eindhoven
Binder: Patist, Den Dolder
Dimensions: 231 x 294 x 10
Amount of pages: 112 p.
Number of copies: 1,000
Price: € 25
ISBN: 978 94 91677 20 5
Font and foundry: Arial Narrow Bold (Monotype)
Binding style: sewn Patabind
Material: 120gsm Munken Lynx Rough 1.4 (interior), 300gsm Munken Lynx Rough 1.4 (cover, with foil blocking by Finishing Touch Foliedruk, Nuth)