How can ostensibly contradictory qualities be combined in a painting in such a way that it becomes convincing as a work of art? For Han Schuil, the answer to that question lies in the work itself. Since the mid eighties he has been painting on aluminum; these strong images draw the eye due to their frontality, plain forms and radiant contrasting colours. But his work is not as unambiguous as it seems at first sight. Schuil’s paintings link the appearance of clarity to a certain friction beneath the surface. Sometimes the optical effect of the colours and forms bonds closely with the qualities of the aluminum; other times it works against those qualities. And then there is his language of forms, which defies any description in terms of figuration and abstraction. Such designations are pointless in Han Schuil’s view. The abstract is, after all, that which cannot be made visible; but visibility is precisely what characterises his work as an artist. He lets himself be guided by images that he comes across in everyday life, images not sought but recognised and, in his paintings, transformed by him into new images. Several of the works now being exhibited involve a motif that he had used earlier in a large diptych from 1994. In that work it took the shape of two eyes appearing in darkness. In works from the recent period these cartoon-like eyes have assumed monumental proportions. The fact that Schuil has chosen this particular motif from the thousands of images that he sees every day has to do with its both terse and alienating simplicity. The oval-shaped pupil – complete with its little contrasting star or even a characteristically wedge-shaped omission – functions as a kind of (punctuation) mark. In Schuil’s adaptation of the motif, that compactness has become even more forceful without any loss of associative meaning. Beneath the frontal, emblematic images lurk the face and other curves of a creature not unlike Betty Boop.
In other works, too, the flatness of the surface and the spatial effect of colours and forms give rise to a suggestive and ambiguous...
