The exhibition The Horse, Etcetera mixes new work with the artist’s early repertoire, including a series of paintings that he made partly in New York in around 1986; a period when figurative painting was considered so passé that its topicality now is surprising. You come face to face with subjects such as The Horse, various still lifes and portraits jumbled together in the successive rooms which do not offer a retrospective but rather extend an invitation to reflect on a few, essential aspects of Vanriet’s exceptional image expression.

Vanriet’s works: images imprinted on your mind’s eye, often signals from a forgotten past, can best be described as beacons of your memory: iconic images, that as you pass by them, make you linger, drawing your attention to a strange experience. Something you noticed by chance, or the memory of something memorable, sometimes tragic, sometimes mundane. Often a subject that still concerns us collectively, but also personal memories that the artist wishes to share with us. Images that are poignant and haunting. And since they cling to your imagination, they invite the viewer to look more closely at the complex layering that the painter has used to compose them.

He approaches his creative process like a craftsman. The image he creates, is achieved in dialogue with the substance chosen, well-considered and well thought-out, but with the hand of a master who presents the end result as being self-evident. And thus the viewer doesn’t really notice the existential doubt the artist is confronted with during the creative process. Vanriet uses his old soulmate, Louis Zoethout, the artist and protagonist of his novel Rovers from 2021, to explain that it is not always an easy task.
Louis, too, is reproached for being ‘easy’ and thus not innovative enough, as if his craftmanship and insight in the profession of being a draughtsman and painter, the durability with which he underpins his creative processes, would impede a creative imagination. But apparently that does not sit well in the trends that curators in the contemporary art scene generally prioritise in their canon. After all, for a while good painting was a blind spot in the ‘topical’ art scene of the last quarter of the twentieth century …
Showing to what extent his contemporary artistic expression was intertwined with the accomplishments of a long and rich artistic tradition was a bold move that Vanriet already achieved with the exhibition Closing Time, a glorious tour that he created in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Antwerp (2010), where he used his own work to dissect and demonstrate the subject of shape in the museum’s historic masterpieces. It enabled the contemporary master to test his own work against the visual tradition that established names had used to build their reputations. In this way he was able to pinpoint the principles of painting. Using the tricks of the trade, he explained why he felt that the cohabitation of classic art with his own contemporary creations was natural.

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Jan Vanriet is an observer of the detail that sets a thing apart. His images hit home because he always manages to focus on what the viewer may well have seen, but hasn’t reflected on. It is the artist that alerts the viewer, drawing their attention to what makes an image special, and then invites them to look more closely. He does so with a deceptive facility that he shares with great cartoonists but also the outstanding people watchers in art history, such as Tiepolo or, closer to home, Pieter Bruegel. Breugel’s humble observation of everyday human life has often been brushed off as typical of genre painting and thus not high art. Even Tiepolo’s brilliant, monumental, but often cynical, banal view of the phenomenon of man is dismissed as light-hearted, facile and mundane. Which then disregards the real insight in artistic tradition and contemporary life that such artists had.

Even if each, individual creation seems to stand on its own, the meaning of many of Vanriet’s works is brimming with a narrative. As if making it is an alternative for writing a column or a discourse of some kind. Vanriet’s double talent sometimes seems to leave him faced with the dilemma of whether to depict or describe. The poet sings about what he cannot describe; the painter depicts what he cannot say. His art aims to communicate things that surround us and move him, but in an engaged way. Not non-committal. What he depicts transcends the obvious meaning. Art is, as he says somewhere in his novel Rovers, significance.

In that respect, the variations on The Horse, from 2015, form an interesting place to linger – he first exhibited a number of these paintings in The Music Boy, Vanriet’s major exhibition at The New Art Gallery Walsall (UK) in 2016.
The Horse is a bizarre, intriguing image of a woman standing up straight, tense and slightly remote, and a man bent over, leaning against her, his face looking down, hidden in the small of her back, his arms around her and their hands firmly entwined.

Together, they form a horse as it is traditionally depicted in children’s games and folksy pantomime. The artist told me how the image simply comes from a childhood memory. A scene from a circus performance that he absorbed with the hungry imagination of a child and supposedly came back to him in the setting of other memories of his repertoire, such as The Music Boy or The Contract, both from 2013. These are pictures that speak of physical connection. Here, two people mime a horse, but in doing so straight away form a pair, a couple.

Once the idea has formed, it becomes a challenge to further elaborate it with a whole range of possibilities that the artist eagerly examines and explores. It makes him the homo ludens in a circus of imagery.

By placing the motif, the man and woman forming a horse, in a dreamlike space, the artist deprives the image of its specific and anecdotal presence and gives it a more universal dimension. In his article, ‘Hide and Seek’, the Berlin art critic, Martin Herbert initially reads it as the letter ‘h’: ‘As if the painting were inchoate language.’ As if in essence the character were the carrier of language – a hieroglyph, that refers to a basic literary substance.

He thus forms a bridge to the writer and poet Jan Vanriet, but in no way weakens his fascination with the icon itself that initially presents itself as a strong symbol and a choice of shape that can then be modulated so versatilely. This shows once again how aware he is of the classic art-history heritage on which his body of works purposefully continues to build. Martin Herbert draws the viewer’s attention to how Vanriet in The Horse, Frozen (2015) paraphrases the pictorial writing of Monet’s Nénuphars. The Horse, Sundown on the other hand seems to draw inspiration from Antoine Watteau’s Pierrot from 1719. In The Horse, Maestà, with the title, the artist by his own account explicitly refers to art-historical tradition that goes back to an Italian work from the 15th century: Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, whose pose of the standing woman provided the moment of inspiration.

In a way it is a postmodern trait ... diametrically opposed to Modernism with Paul Klee who reverted to an unspoilt child’s drawing, with Dubuffet who sought a solution in Outsider Art, with the Bauhaus movement that was averse to any form of historical eclecticism. Whereas modern art renounced any ties with its academic roots, someone like Vanriet, a child of his time, gets his inspiration from the ‘ballast of an emotionally charged past’ so accursed by the Modernists. By quoting the rich, visual culture of western art history and its classical heritage, he gives his work a new, contemporary dimension.

However it goes a lot further than just visual quotations or nods to pictorial techniques. In all the variations of The Horse cycle, the image at first glance is a sign. It is noticeable that there is always a shadow, a mat or a horizon that admittedly spatially conditions the figure, whilst simultaneously universalising the undefined nature of that space.

In The Horse With Rug, he revisits the pose of the Madonna del Parto, but he removes the characters even further from their surroundings to modulate the content of his image by giving it a new expression and approaching its content with more depth. The space hardly even matters any more. The carpet’s pattern, that he has adopted from a previous version, does still remain, albeit graphically represented, but it returns in an almost abstract form. He above all uses it to push the couple forming the horse to the foreground, so that the man’s bent posture is there as a token, even more so than in the other versions.

Here, the artist accentuates the body language in the figuration to convey the content even more expressively and makes it clear that he is not just concerned with formalistically playing with shape, but also hopes to find new substantive associations. He thus assimilates the pattern into an iconographic theme: The Horse becomes a married couple and thus straight away a beautiful metaphor for marriage. Once that step has been taken, you can only see the horse pantomime as a metaphor that evokes an array of values and storylines. As a result, we can no longer just reflect on the simple recognition of the shape, but are confronted with the “meaning” the artist has introduced.

Vanriet achieves this not only by tinkering with the composition. The painter also knows what he can achieve with colour. In The Horse, Maësta With Rug, he underpins the green of the cardigan and dress against the lilac pink background; the strength in the figure of the woman versus the role of the man in his blue-grey clothes. Vanriet’s entire oeuvre is peppered with this type of imagery. Often you can see him accentuate the feelings expressed on a face by means of shadow or colour accent. Note how the striped cap in Striped Cap (2016) becomes an attribute of the man’s heavy heart.

A very recognisable element in his imagery is the hidden face, whereby the face is hidden in the hands or the person hides to avoid having to show indescribable emotions. It is a topos that worked back in antiquity and Cicero already praised following the way in which Timanthes of Cynthus painted Agamemnon’s extreme grief at his daughter Iphegenia’s sacrifice. You can find it having been used by quite a number of Renaissance artists. P.C. Hooft included it in his Emblemata Amatoria as a gesture of shame and timidity. Vanriet not only uses it as a quote, but also as a self-evident body expression with which he manages to give his image that deeper, layered structure.

The man in The Horse also hides his face and that brings us to the portrayal of mankind that the artist confronts his audience with: a self-image that immediately proves a reflection of society. It is an almost anthropological approach to the phenomenon of man that sees the notion of its ‘humanitas’ reduced to a sobering, solitary existence. Mankind, that since the Renaissance saw itself as created in the image and likeness of God and now, confronted with the mess it has made of things, such as the cruelty of the Holocaust and the atrocities of other extremism, the powerlessness of religious compassion, must acknowledge its failure. Mankind, that once stood as da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man at the Zenith, as the measure of all things, that now, stripped of glory, is confronted with itself: vulnerable, fragile and failing.

‘What a piece of work is man…’

It immediately evokes Hamlet’s doubts, where he shatters the Renaissance humanistic world view when greeting his hypocrite friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

In just as sobering a way as the painter depicts his view of the phenomenon that is man here with The Horse, the writer Vanriet recently did so too. He did so movingly as a chronicler in Radeloos Geluk (2018) and as a novelist, almost in autobiographic form, in a trilogy made up of Rovers (2021), Bloot Verder (2023) and the newly published Spijkers in de wolken, in which the painter, writer and poet are alternately at the forefront.

Where the chronicler testifies, the novelist confesses. Even if it’s still fiction, these are egodocuments, romans à clef, where he reveals himself and his wife plays her role, as the woman does in the team of The Horse. The painter clearly gave her the facial features of his wife Simone, so that you logically postulate that he is the bent man behind her.

What stands out straight away is that, in sharp contrast to the somewhat wretched, docile pose of the man, she really is present, with her straight back, her matter-of-fact look and an air of having the situation under control...

A number of successive chapters in Rovers shed a special light on The Horse as the metaphor for marriage, with which he gives the series of paintings an iconic dimension.

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When in Rovers the leading character, the painter Louis Zoethout, inspired by Nicolas Poussin, with a reasonable amount of artistic success attempts a remake of his Sabijnse Maagdenroof, things start to go wrong. The subject is known to us all thanks to the Roman historian Livy. He describes how the ancient Romans resolved the lack of women in their society in a wilful way by abducting the daughters of the neighbouring Sabine tribe.

The story has inspired many a painter. The confrontation of Rubens’ versions of the theme with that by Poussin offers substance for in-depth lectures on art history about the mythical view of humanity and doctrine of affection. Zoethout feels like he’s on home ground. Yes, the result is a beautiful painting. But he is not prepared for the fact that the current, woke, English-speaking society will only see this image as rape.

What for the artist was a complete success, an academic masterpiece, unexpectedly appears to be a testimonial of perverse machismo. The trend-conscious press senses controversy, rips him apart, seeing a sitting target. He is completely blown away by this. Luckily he has his very down-to-earth wife, not just for moral support but also as a critical sounding board and observer. In the end, the way in which the two of them relate to each other takes shape in The Horse, a contemporary metaphor, in which the doubting, white man is attributed the role of antihero. A role directly opposed to the dominating one awarded man in the classical canon since the biblical Story of Creation.

And thus the human figure in all its manifestations continues to fascinate Vanriet. Often as an isolated motif, like his wife in recent works such as Simone in Muzee, Louizastraat, Stripes and Dots or Nostalgia: images plucked from his personal journal. In the smaller painting The Visitor (Studio) from 2015, the British art historian and critic Andrew Graham-Dixon discovered in the visitor ‘a mixture of tension and vigilance in her body language, but a look of compassion on her face’ and thus for him she becomes an accomplice, she displays ‘the air of an accomplice: a partner in the act of remembering’.

The Homecoming, Memisis, Guard (2023) and Revenge (1993) each fade into their own story as an appearing form. Like the woman in the vast series with the Madonnas: a personification of a refugee without papers. Elsewhere, he reduces his human figure to simply a silhouette, to animate a dark edge of a forest or some eerie or even hostile place.

Vanriet’s entire body of work exudes social commitment. Not that he tosses around messages; rather he is one of those artists who observes from the sideline and sees himself as a mirror for all the dramatic banality that happens to us all. Hence the recurring self-portrait in his figuration, Ecce homo. He does this with a stylised sense of poetry, where melancholy, alienation and doubt often form the undertone of his reflections that he renders with great irony, sometimes with sarcasm, other times with poignant compassion, in the shapes he uses.

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Jan Vanriet creates with a remarkable economy of means. Just like his narrative, his image always has something transparent, something light, however grim the subject might be. It makes him a virtuoso painter of still lifes, a mercilessly sharp portraitist, but also an elegiac landscape painter. Although his most recent landscapes from the striking series Breendonks Blauw, exhibited last summer at the infamous fort and prison camp, show a clear parallel with the ‘guilty landscapes’ in Vanriet’s body of work that Stefan Hertmans already referred to twenty years ago. But that’s another story...

A number of Berlin cityscapes from 2013 are something very special: chaotic light impressions arranged as abstract, musical compositions with which he shows that – even if they are fairly monochrome – his pictorial work is very strong.

But in spite of all this, from a stylistic point of view Vanriet remains a Poussinist. It is no coincidence that in the novel Rovers Louis Zoethout has Poussin’s version in mind for his Abduction of the Sabine Women. He also joins the ranks of the academic school that focuses on the Renaissance confrontation (or ‘paragone’) between ‘disegno’ and ‘colore’ and shares the conviction that in painting in the end it is the lines that determine the shape. Colour is used to emphasise expression. But a good painting is primarily a question of ‘disegno’. It is the drawing that guarantees a balanced composition of the picture. The pure line is the backbone giving form to the imagery.

This serves Vanriet well, allowing him to use that graphic virtuosity for the narrative in his larger compositions, such as the painting Incident Closed (1986), in which the portrait of the Soviet Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky is confronted with that of his passionate love, Lily, the wife of his friend Osip Brik. The title of a work is not some random choice. The words 'Incident closed’ come directly from the suicide note Mayakovsky wrote to Mr and Mrs Brik just before he took his own life (14 April 1930): ‘And, as they say, the incident is closed./ Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind./Now you and I are quits. Why bother then. /To balance mutual sorrows, pains, and hurts.’ A sinking ship symbolises the fiasco of their love affair.

Thus Vanriet processes one of the most traumatic memories as if he personally experienced it. And every time he surprises us with how he succeeds in compressing erudite knowledge and information into a simple image, and thus, using visual quotes, loading a memory with a maximum of facts and emotions. Like the way in which he visually cites a motif from the Mayakovsky sphere in the monumental painting Revenge, that is part of the collection of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, in which he incorporates one of Mayakovsky’s Rosta figures: overactive figures that he drew for propaganda posters. The dominant figure of the squatting man is based on a photo from 1935 by Boris Ignatovich, a photographer who belonged to the hard core of the agitprop. In 1993 Vanriet turned that image into one of his typical personifications in a linocut, of which the unique print is on display in this exhibition.

The tense, somewhat desperate stance of the male figure in this work – as Vanriet feels this, the man is not simply a viewer but rather someone embroiled in inner conflict – makes me think of The Horse, and also La Guerre de Troie. The latter was painted in New York: two men fighting in a playground, next to them lies a gigantic beer can, perhaps Budweiser. In the man with the hat we see the painter from his self-portraits from that period, the mid nineteen eighties, created for his double exhibition at Isy Brachot in Brussels Discours sur la mythologie pour travailleurs. The mythology in the title refers once again to Mayakovsky, who tried grandly turn his life into poetry and was unable or unwilling to avoid the tragedy.

Vanriet has been inspired more often by an image he has found that struck him, immediately distilling a remake from it and imbuing it with his own interpretation. The smaller painting Lotus is partly inspired by a print by the Romanian painter Arthur Segal for the December 1911 issue of Der Sturm. The self-portrait Saulus refers to Pyke Koch’s Self-portrait with black headband, a canvas he admires, but in his interpretation the fascist’s headband has become a blindfold.

The world of Vanriet’s visual quotations can take us a long way. After all, his art flourishes in a biotope of erudition and facts. It gives his body of work a particular allure, making his work complex and interesting. But the strength of his art is actually far more fundamental: where the visual artist takes over from the writer and even the poet must fall silent.

It is the hand of the painter-artist who is able to give shape to his observations with a ruthless accuracy, that quietens the viewer and awes them. Nowhere can we get to know them better than in his virtuoso still lifes. Vanriet, who is able to show the poetry of two bell peppers, artichokes on a dish, a dead finch... The artist who raises the triviality of a tin ashtray bearing advertising or a black rubber duck to a remarkable moment of such beauty in the sober reality of everyday life. The artist of desperate happiness.

21 April 2024

Jan Vanriet (°1948) is a painter and author. He has exhibited at the major biennales and at many foreign museums and art galleries. In addition he has published poetry bundles, autobiographical essays in Radeloos geluk and two contemplative novels about art and society: Rovers and Bloot verder. The final part of this trilogy of novels, Spijkers in de wolken, was recently published.

The Horse, Etcetera is Vanriet's fifteenth exhibition at Galerie De Zwarte Panter.

Paul Huvenne (°1949) was involved in the research into Rubens at the Centrum Rubenianum, Antwerp as a researcher, and in 1984 as curator of the Rubenshuis, took on caring for the museum. From 1997 to 2014 he was the General and Artistic Director of the Museum of Fine Arts of Antwerp.