People Ruin Paintings is the catalogue accompanying John Robinson's solo exhibition at nodenaysteen, 14 February to 28 April 2026, curated by Hanna Ouaziz. The book is not simply a record of the exhibition: it is a structural extension of it, rendering the show's formal logic legible for readers who were not present.
Five performances form its backbone. Three took place on the opening night, distributed across the building's three floors as a passage through Dante's Hell, Purgatory and Heaven — a collective alphabet board of twenty-six letters on the ground floor, extended public tarot sessions on the first, a staged baptism in a jacuzzi on the second. Two later performances close the sequence. In Hemisphere of the Earth, blindfolded participants drew, without knowing it, on Robinson's finished paintings: the exhibition performed its own title rather than illustrating it. In The Sphere of the Moon, the black cloth from Purgatory was cut into thirty-one pieces, each matched to a painting, and three men covered the works one by one — the exhibition ended by removing the thing it had been assembled to show.
The book also holds The Finter Method, an instruction for automatic writing dated c. 1912–1920 (Cornell University Library, PJ Mode Collection), a conversation between Robinson and Em. Prof. Freddy Decreus, Decreus's essay On the Hermit Deep Within Us, the artist's biography and the full list of thirty-one works.
The publication is in English. The complete interior can be browsed below, and the PDF is a free download. The printed book is for sale from 1 September 2026: collect it during opening hours at nodenaysteen, or have it sent for € 7 postage. Payment to account BE35 7350 7162 0037 of Stichting DeNode, quoting the title.
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