Han Schuil at Stadsgalerij Heerlen - Heerlen, Holland - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

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Han Schuil makes hard-edged paintings upon aluminum, rendering familiar things that quickly register upon the eyes. The simplest of the dozen novel works shown in this handsome, recent city gallery in Holland's far southern was a cutout of a single fulvous eye with a black pupil. Along with a pair of organ of sights (aluminum ovals painted with azure pupils on white) it was the first work individual saw upon entering the gallery. These powerful images might show the artist's vision or symbolize the viewer's task.

Schuil disentangleed his bold, iconic format about a decade ago and has now evolv a locate of motifs that includes, besides the organ of sights a puffy cloud; a circle with a horizontal interior bar something like the international "no exit" symbol; and a silhouette of a house above its mirror image, as if throw backed in a canal: it has a cover and chimney at bottom as well as upon top.

A variation of that house appears in an untitled 1994-95 painting that at 2 through 3 meters, and consisting of sum of two units horizontally joined strips of aluminum, was the largest piece in the present to view Here the house is an elongated silhouette with three chimneys and three doors. Separate feathers of smoke cozily puff up from the top chimneys to join collegially in a vapor The shape of the house is unevenly blackened, with equal reason that one sees through to a watery cerulean underlayer. At lower left a small rectangle contains a receding black-and-yellow checkerboard; in the sooty vapor at right is the circular international type here yellow on blue.

While this work displays a bit more brushwork than usual in Schuil's oils (his watercolors, not shown are more painterly), the clarity, flatness and domestic imagery of his work appear to be typically Dutch. A faint humor blebs underneath his crisp surface: there's something jokey about a technique that makes the shapes gaze like thin films that could be pare ed off. Moreover, the cartoonish simplification of forms implies a knowing diminishment of painterly pretensions.

Still, the images are not all to be taken lightly. The checkerboard, as a shorthand relation to Vermeer, may signal the glory and load of the past that a painter in Holland can't escape. Thus it would appear to be that the "no exit" sign is not a random choice, either. level when, as in Schuil's case, a Dutch artist tracks clarity of organization and form, explicit meaning almost not at any time goes with it. His work not long ago has seemed in danger of falling into repetitiveness and becoming barely a recapitulation of his known motifs, rather than a reply to life, as it was back when he was inspired by means of advertisements and other elements of popular tillage But perhaps these recent works approach as close to revealing the forces that constrain Dutch painters today as anyone is likely to admit. [The work was shown in tandem with the self-portraits of Philip Akkerman (see A.i.A., Dec '92)]

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