Reviews!
The Comics Reporter
Bart Beaty
The book, which is wordless, follows a number of interweaving stories, generally featuring themes of love, loss, violence, alienation and loneliness. What is most striking about the work, however, is its formal complexity and adventurous spirit. Panels flow into other panels in unusual and highly complex manners. Van Dinther works to present simultaneity through sequentiality, and the book is constantly referencing its own narrative strategies. It is not enough to say that everything folds back onto itself in CHRZ, instead we have book that is complexly prismatic, a structure suggested by the point-of-view of the housefly that moves through the pages.
(...) it is clear that Stefan van Dinther has tossed down a gauntlet, producing a slick, smart, beautiful, but above all, difficult work that requires contemplation. Take it to your nearest golf course, and think on it for a while.
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Madinkbeard
Derik A. Badman
I’ve read Van Dinther’s album CHRZ a few times now and I can’t tell you what it’s all about. That I keep rereading it despite my confusion is a testament to the visual invention and graphic force of the work.
(...) A mysterious and fascinating graphic novella.
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Wired Magazine
Maurice Martin
CHRZ traces the tangled lines of passion and intrigue in a seaside town. Half the town is rendered in color, and the other half is depicted in black and white, as if to suggest that even our closest neighbors live in a world that's foreign to us. Van Dinther also plays with themes of intimacy; in one scene, a woman looks into her lover's "thought balloon" and catches him fantasizing about another woman.
(...) You're suddenly aware of what the medium could be if artists approached every blank page as mysterious, unexplored territory.
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Clifface Comics
Justin J. Fox
CHRZ may be one of the most important publications of 2005.
(...) This is a story about observation and the effects of the observer on the observed. It is about the way we try to shape experiments that aren't yeilding the results we want. It is about the way nature will find ways to confound those who try to tamper with her. It's about an active hand of god, of unalterable fate, about the way the stories we tell ourselves have a way of coming true.
(...) It's a beautiful book. It's an exciting experiment. It contains meanings and morals beneath its surface. It has an ambiguous ending, but a book like this should be read for all the details, all the components that lead to that ending. This is where the story lies, in the small moments that fly by too fast to notice whether we're paying attention or not. van Dinther tells us as much on his cover.
The Comics Journal
Gregory Zura
Van Dinther's stories are simple in artistic style with stiff blocky lines that tell geometric secrets in the dark.
(...) Each panel of his stories seem completely random until you finish, step back and read all of the panels at once - at the same time. It is really quite an achievement of not only method but of perspective. There are no protagonists, no antagonists and no narrators - one's person's dream may melt into another person's waking life and then is thrown back again when an object like a knife or a bird appear.
Time.com
Andrew Arnold
Basically a bullet, a fly, a woman and a crow are going to be in the same place at the same moment. The depiction of that moment from several different angles becomes the story. At one point van Dinther lays out the page so that it can be read left to right, with each row a different point of view over the course of time, or vertically, with each column depicting the same moment from a different point of view.
(...) You need to put aside conventional notions of how comix can entertain and accept that the challenge of such works becomes the entertainment.
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The Comics Journal
Bart Beaty
CHRZ by Van Dinther, is a hauntingly beautiful exercise in mute panel transitions rendered in a wonderfully flat art style. This work challenges the reader to conceptualize new boundaries between panels, and new relationships between space and time in comics.
Positiverage.com
Sullivan
Points de vue multiples, récits à l'intérieur du récit, ellipses, dilatation de la durée de certaines actions, frontières entre rêve et réalité brouillées : voici quelques unes des stratégies utilisées par notre auteur pour vous prendre au piège de son labyrinthe. Vous n'aurez cependant pas à vous méfier des textes car, on ne l'a pas encore mentionné, le récit est entièrement muet.
Une œuvre ambitieuse, iconoclaste et ouverte. Un défi lancé au lecteur !
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Stripschrift
Erik van der Hoeven
Van Dinther laat zien dat de blik waarmee je naar de werkelijkheid kijkt maatgevend is voor het oordeel. Wie meer ziet, zoals de vlieg, ziet meer èn andere dingen. Zelfs al lig je in een bed en lijk je elkaar na te staan, zijn er nog werelden van verschil. Wat er gebeurt hangt voor een deel af van de inhoud van de eigen gedachtewolkjes, maar misschien wel meer van de invulling door anderen daarvan. Het kan de keuze bepalen voor een revolver of mes, voor een vriendelijk woord of een beschermende arm. Uiteindelijk blijft er hoogstens een verhaal dat vertelt kan worden, of getekend. Dat kan in een boek. Stefan van Dinther doet dat op een bijzonder originele manier. Hij goochelt grote en kleine gevoelens, is een meester met zwart/wit-gebruik en speelt met tijd en ruimte.
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Goddeau.com
Marc Bastijns
CHRZ is een verhaal vol mysteries en niet in het minst door de titel : een afkorting, een klanknabootsing, het lijkt allemaal weinig waarschijnlijk. Naast deze cryptische titel biedt het album echter een schat aan inventief kunstenaarschap waarin de wetten van de strip vermengd worden met die van andere kunstvormen zoals de film en de schilderkunst. CHRZ is een ongrijpbaar album. De lezer weet dat hij het nooit volledig kan vatten, maar vindt toch voldoening in het eindeloze streven.
