VELLLLUM is an artist's book by Dutch visual artist Micha Patiniott, with an essay by artist and writer Mila Lanfermeijer.
It hovers between the intimate and the mystical, the reflective and the irreverent.
The book unfolds as a non-linear constellation of paintings and text-based visual poems, spanning work from 2020 to 2025. Patiniott treats vellum as both metaphor and material: a membrane at once fragile and resistant, surface and skin. His work lingers in the porous space where image, language, memory, and perception blur, where the ordinary slips into the strange. Painting and text appear as a looped gesture of contact: touching, withdrawing, returning.
Across five onomatopoeically titled chapters — FLUUUX, PEEEEP, POWWW, THUUUD, and LOOOP — visual poetry scatters language across space like scores, echoing paintings of dissolving bodies, folded geometries, glowing brushes, solarized phalli, and empty sheets cycling between presence and disappearance. Loops, splits, and recursions thread through these works, suggesting painting folding back on itself.
Look inside (video) ↪
A final chapter, RESONANZRAUM, gathers references from art history, mysticism, pop culture, and philosophy that echo through Patiniott’s practice.
Designer Thomas Payne developed a custom typeface for the book, with ligatures that spiral, repeat, and echo the recursive gestures of the paintings and visual poems.
“Each moment of contact asks the same question perception asks itself. Just when we think we’ve traveled farthest from the beginning, the loop returns.”
- MP
Design by Thomas Payne
ISBN 978-90-9040039-6
Softcover, open spine, 160 pages, 210 x 310 mm
Published 2025
Made possible with the support of the
Jaap Harten Fonds
a turn in its line / tomorrow is my turn
When does a gesture speak? can an opening reach itself? who looks back?
'a turn in its line / tomorrow is my turn' follows expression in its reaching and faltering, the outer folding into the inner. It opens fractures and hollows, moments in which the self keeps turning back on itself. A gesture half-made, a sentence breaking off. A hand moves, stops, starts again. The eye blinking. A turn can be a shift, a return, or simply a pause. The line becomes a curve, a split or wound.
The book moves through painting, drawing, text, text-based visual poems. and video-stills, circling the porousness of things. In the paintings, faces and bodies appear and dissolve, half-seen, split, folded. Surfaces behave like organs: porous, shifting, carrying their own memory. Earlier works re-enter the present, recursive but punctured.
A childhood drawing of a face reveals how surfaces, paper, skin, can come undone, reality pocked with holes. The texts act as half-openings, tracing an anatomy of intimacy: distance aching, a cut, a tongue, a stammer.
Video-stills show an empty book that flips as Nina Simone sings of longing and hope. A counterpoint text, inspired by Gertrude Stein’s continuous present, loops and frays. Lo-fi feedback blooms into color. Each return tries to hold something and admits its slipping away.
At the center is desire and delay: the moment a line, a word, a note almost reaches back.
Design, texts, and images by Micha Patiniott
Softcover, 86 pages, 148 x 210 mm
Typeface: looping mathematical objects, thomas payne
Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition
a turn in its line / tomorrow is my turn
at ruimteCAESUUR, middelburg, zeeland, october 2025
