Fleur van Dodewaard’s “131 Variations” begins with an act of deliberate copying. Taking Sol LeWitt’s “122 Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes” as her model, she set out to recreate and photograph the work as an exact duplicate. The copy refused to hold: cubes went missing, others appeared twice, and previously unknown variants arose. What the publisher calls the project’s “failure” is in fact its subject, and the book records the point at which a closed system of mathematical permutations opens onto arbitrariness, inconsistency, and chance.

The photographer is Van Dodewaard. The book is published by Fw:Books and designed by Hans Gremmen. Running to 288 pages, in colour, in hardcover at 17 by 22 centimetres, it treats seriality as a physical and editorial problem rather than a merely conceptual one, so that the accumulation of near-identical images—and the irregularities that accumulate among them—becomes something the reader encounters at the pace of turning pages.

The stakes are conceptual as well as photographic. If LeWitt’s 122 variations could be supplemented, then the set was never exhaustive; the logic that produced it was a convention, not a law. Van Dodewaard’s variant count is not a correction of LeWitt but a demonstration of the excess any system carries within it: the deliberate “failure” introduces moments of arbitrariness, inconsistency, and irrationality into an aleatory process, allowing for coincidence and thereby challenging mathematical logic.

For a collector, the interest lies in that double address—an artwork about an artwork, rendered as a book that must be read. It documents a specific conceptual proposition, records its own unplanned deviations, and does so with a designer’s attention to how 288 pages hold a reader’s time. It rewards the shelf where artists’ books and photographic books are kept together, precisely because it refuses to sit comfortably in either category.