It is our sorrow. Shall it melt? Ah, water

Would gush, flush, green these mountains and these valleys,

And we rebuild our cities, not dream of islands.

W.H. Auden, Paysage Moralisé

Money could be made by charging one Belgian Franc every time a painter is called ‘literary’ - an expression that usually signifies one is at a loss as to how the images refer to the words, when they clearly do have something to do with them.

Based on the work of Valerio Adami, Derrida [1] states that the painting actually hides two paintings. One cuts off your breath, remains alien to all speech, remains an ‘ordre de présence’ in authoritative silence. The second, eloquent and inexhaustible, reproduces an ancient language, something that comes too late and yet contains the text that intrigues us so time after time. In this case the text is his own book Glas - which Adami illustrated with drawings. But in more general terms, it is the text we want to read every time we see the illustrations. What can make the figuration so abstract - much more abstract than abstract art, that interlude of modernism that now appears so naive - is exactly this elusiveness of the evoked narrative.

Vanriet has been called a literary painter countless times. He has also become associated with literature, because he was known to the public as an illustrator of sorts of literary texts. Images by Vanriet frequently adorned the covers of literary books, or were included in bibliophile publications. His economic style of drawing, the clear, sparse lines, that which Freddy de Vree once called Vanriet’s ‘acquired virtuosity’ - in an age that admired the philosphical perspective on conceptual art, these symbolized for many an incomprehensible academism that had outlived itself. From that perspective, any painter inevitably would have become an illustrator, not a creator of a world of philosophical aporia, [2] and would therefore be associated with the medieval profession of illuminator of manuscripts - a title Vanriet, in all modesty and with ironic grace, might have accepted as an honorary title. Meanwhile, a whole and, to those who were familiar with his work, astounding universe of disruptive images developed in his studio. These appeared to ignore the actuality of art, but concerned the question of how to shape the heaps of symbols, which imposed themselves on him biographically and iconographically. Only the eclectic style of postmodernism enabled the notion to mature that such poly-stylistic image makers, who proved tributary to a whole range of iconographic forefathers, perhaps gave shape to actuality more aptly than some clever producers of ephemeral witticisms. The revaluation of Picabia in the 1980s was perhaps the most explicit illustration of this emerging awareness.

Vanriet is an œuvre builder, in the fullest sense of the word - this can also be understood in a literary manner. Typical of the œuvre builder is the tendency to construct a personal world in which many other worlds emerge, are soaked up and digested, and metamorphosed into something inalienable personal. Vanriet is automatically tributary to a whole range of historically suffused iconographic themes. He handles visual elements literally like a poet handles words: he arranges them, rearranges them, deletes, adds, revises, starts his pictorial phrase anew, tastes it, takes up themes at large intervals, interweaves motives and metaphors, and relies, when push comes to shove, on the strength of intuition. Like a poet, he is after an ambiguous whole that carries an impression of transparency while simultaneously withdrawing from simple analysis. He is aware that the image itself, if it has been constructed carefully, always evokes more complex associations than schematic intentions.

As one delves deeper, the connections become more impressive. Jan Vanriet is something of a contemporary symbolist, a semiotician with paint, for whom each reference fits in a hermetical system, behind which he frequently attempts to secrete emotion and memory.

One might wonder what generations in a distant future would read into the paintings of Vanriet... these rebus-like works in which our own actuality and the recent past have been so encoded, that we must, every time, search for something that will break the code: a smudge on a water colour, a meticulously copied stencil, or a graphite drawing on an alkyd painting, an ironic point in the title. Many of Vanriet’s paintings can make not only the future viewer, but also the contemporary feel like a fool, unable to put the cryptic symbols in their rightful place. Yet his work presents itself initially as an inviting, visual play: now sensory and loose, now geometrical and abstract; now like a transparent historical reference, now as a pictorial rebus that releases its meaning in driblets onto the viewer. Vanriet’s plastic strategies are very similar to text strategies; the standard way to break open such systems of symbols is a kind of exegesis, a comparative textual study of the material.

In his series Laatste sneeuw (Last snow) Vanriet succeeds in suggesting all of this with minimal means. The series portrays a vague landscape - in dark tones, erased, gone. Where is the last snow in these images that look so desolate? What connection is there between these pale smudges, that light up in a miasma of darker tones, and the connotations of clarity, purity and virginity, that are normally associated with snow? Here the vague grey tracks that light up in the sombre sections are more reminders of what remains of snow after a whole column of tanks has passed over it. A variation on the famous phrase by Milan Kundera might be: since World War II every landscape is suspect. The landscape in the series Last snow carries these strong suspect connotations of the truly lived, barely decipherable, because the tracks have faded in an indifferent nature. In the painting Rood woud (Red forest) the whole landscape has become overrun with a semiology: it is a red, schematic forest, thin trunks as if painted by Savereys in the Latem of the beginning of the twentieth century - but now they are bathing in the radical imputation of blood colour, and they are laden with shapes whose meaning can only be guessed at: no answer can be found in this landscape, only a symbol that remains open like a wound. At the same time, Vanriet did nothing more than shift the palette; I am totally responsible for the association.

Something in Vanriet’s Last snow reminds us of the desolate theatricalism of Anselm Kiefer’s early landscapes. Like Kiefer, Vanriet has an ascetic strength to resist the temptation that can emanate from images of past horror. While Kiefer uses painting as a means to fire ideologically familiar images of the absent at us, Vanriet circumspectly assembles apparently heterogeneous elements and seldom paints in broad strokes. His images are less rhetorical, but more encoded, as is apparent in, for example, Krater en boom (Crater and Tree), a landscape with elements Kiefer might also use. But what does this apparently innocent field of colour represent? A fence with two objects drawn upon it? A brown field where a bomb has just struck and only a tree-stump remains? But then why is the tree-stump sawn to size so neatly and precisely, like a small log from the supply of a peaceful lumberjack? In a Kiefer, the tree-stump would have become a trunk destroyed by violence. Vanriet made it a suspect object, awkwardly sawn to size. In this contrast Vanriet’s ironic subtlety becomes clear. The tree-stump sawn to size suggests the work of man who has vanished, doubly wry next to the crater.

In the series Last snow too, Vanriet shuns all obvious theatricality and he fills the images with a new, unsteady strength that lacks reference, hides references at greater depths. Then why do I associate these images so obstinately with past sorrow? What could justify such an interpretation? Am I, like so many before me, impressed with the account that Vanriet’s father wrote about his time in Mauthausen extermination camp - an overwhelming and pitch black account of the power to survive the inhuman? [3] Partly, yes - it is almost impossible to separate this awareness from Vanriet’s images. His entire evolution is a demonstration of how this artist went in search of a passable path between traumatic memory and livability with an eye to the future. But first and foremost, it is the pictorial quality that puts me on this track - even without the story I, a man who has grown up in the twentieth century, am infected with this awareness; images immersed in such a semantic darkness always show us that which cannot be shown. Like Lanzmann in Shoah, Vanriet invariably chooses to pick up something from the stories people tell. He wants to suggest, but not show, that which is gone. No matter how sloganesque some of his earlier images may have appeared (for example from the Majakovski period), Vanriet has always succeeded in creating an ambiguity that returned the pictures to themselves, to their own strength and suggestiveness. The title of this series suggests to me that there is snow; but what I see in the paint resembles mud tracks - black snow. This metonym is sufficient to start up the whole horde of ominous thoughts that surround the historically charged landscape.

The series Last snow is typical of Vanriet’s whole œuvre, albeit radically typical: the motif, which is historically, culturally and biographically charged, emerges through the passion for painting, the search for an image that is forming. Thus the painful memory is gradually replaced by the brightening of the image. This image cannot separate itself from its ‘ordre de présence’: the pictorial narrative, the story of the materialized image. The landscape starts wandering through the iconography, in art history, and there, suffused with a lightness that seems to have become guilty, it returns. Kiefer, Monet, Matisse, possibly other referents hidden in the series - Vanriet literally loses his way to come home to the indeterminableness of his image. On one of the photographs the artist sent me of this series, was written: ‘Monet is not far away... - which was not my intention...’ This second observation especially is of crucial importance. The painting, which is the first story, thwarts the submerged story we so much want to read. To speak, again, with Derrida: the first story cuts off the breath, the second tries to speak, even becomes eloquent because of us - by our looking. But together they form a pair that does not grant reconciliation, only a perception that is impossible to end definitively.

Every painting is ultimately a riddle, writes R. Kitaj in his book First Diasporist Manifesto. [4] In this important essay, Kitaj states that the artist is always something of a wandering Jew; nomadism can be translated into images that never want to settle down. To Kitaj (remarkably, as the Jewish tradition tends to think iconoclastically), making images is a typically Jewish activity; it cannot be separated from what has happened to the Jews in the twentieth century, or from the destiny of the Jews up to the camps: to be wanderers for whom language was the only remaining homeland. Because images are the medium that symbolizes, much more directly than the words, the transcendent experience of a solidarity with past and community, they are also the bearers of the painful awareness that there (no longer) is any coming home. It is therefore not inappropriate to state that Vanriet himself also exhibits this Jewish, nomadic spirit. But the nomad also wants to decipher the texts he finds on his way, and he is therefore doomed to become, nolens volens, an exegete.

Ultimately, Vanriet’s landscapes have much in common with the notion of the ‘paysage moralisé’ - the eighteenth century landscapes that were already given a moral charge through their conception, symbol language and design. The two deep blue canvases with the title In Oostenrijk (In Austria) are strong examples. The first one is small, it shows surreal blue stone and distance, a few piles of snow, vague shapes as they are found in the Alps. The sort of landscape Robert Walser lost his way in. Even though it is painted with pictorial subtlety, it looks almost like an exercise by a painter who wanted to play with a cliché. But the work does not stand alone. It is corroded by what happens in the second canvas with the same title. This second painting, a mountain landscape in the same blue, is large, theatrical, and the eye automatically starts searching at the top: where the high mountain tops begin. Is this, again, the familiar and threadbare peace that reigns over Gœthe’s proverbial summits? [5] The suspicious gaze literally slides down the massive blue mountain side and there, bottom right, finds a few chalets - charming, anecdotal, and slightly childlike. But again the motif of the moralised landscape forces itself on us: the small houses are somewhat elongated, and therefore remind us inescapably of the barracks in other series. Only now do we see that the snowy plane on which the houses stand, inclines dangerously, leading to a ravine hidden from our view - in which the majestic mountain tops flow away as it were, into an invisible crevice. From seeming innocence to profound guilt: the development of historical awareness caught in an icon. The result, achieved by extremely economical means: Über allen Gipfeln ist Schuld.

Vanriet once painted a series Toteninsel - rocky blocks of stone, floating almost autarkically in a mental space, symbols of perished ideologies (with subtitles like ‘Böcklin und Sozialismus’ or ‘Het vlot van de doctrine’ (‘The Raft of Doctrine’), which refers to Géricault’s Vlot van de Medusa (Raft of the Medusa). In the context of German culture a reminiscence of Hölderlin’s Hyperions Schicksalslied emerged elsewhere around the same time (1989): ‘Es schwinden, es fallen/ die leidenden Menschen/ (...)/ Jahr lang ins Ungewisse hinab’. This reference to Hölderlin, made explicitly by Vanriet himself, [6] makes his preoccupation with a landscape heavily marked by totalitarian regimes much more timeless and much more apocalyptical. That is why the Toteninsel are so unheimlich: they appear to be remnants of a world that slips from view permanently. But, as is so often the case with Vanriet, the motif of the Toteninsel reappears years later, and the seemingly minimal shift, apparently dictated by a purely pictorial exploring, renders the motif more abstract: this latest version, painted in the autumn of 1999 (i.e. ten years later), again shows the massif, but instead of a difficult to define and agitated context around it, we see a completely cleared background, which plainly works as pictorial foundation: the boulder appears to have been placed on a conscientiously painted plain field, either for the purpose of dissection or as a curiosity. It even casts a somewhat naive shadow, like a model under artificial lighting. But most of all the Toteninsel itself has undergone some freely brushed changes, that make it look something like... a primitive cathedral. Decline of old worlds, was the earlier symbolistic explanation of the Toteninsel-series. But here it becomes something else again; an image in which conflicting notions compete inextricably with each other. Does future religion loom up here like a monolith from the past? Only the plastic shift presents a place for such notions, not the effect of motif or the theme.

Not much later, playful again and cheerful, Vanriet paints his umpteenth mass of rocks and quite simply calls it Rots (Rock). However, on closer inspection, the innocent rock turns out to be the Lorelei. And there we find, significantly enclosed, the evil fairytale of Vanriets paradoxical bind to the German landscape: like a siren it calls him, and time after time both his intention and our view are smashed against the ‘stone-ness of the stone’, as Viktor Sjklovski once characterised alienation. Such image-strategies make Vanriet’s landscapes so ‘moralisé’ - which is not at all like moralistic. All kinds of new motifs are fired at us because of a minor shift in the pictorial reproduction. The moralization is therefore not in the message that Vanriet would sometimes enclose too emphatically, but in mobilizing the suspicion in how we look.

Because of this strategy, Vanriet’s work is still openly mimetic. Not that he depicts nature in his landscapes - he never really does that - but because he responds to another, more pressing experience of the look for contemporary viewers: deconstruction in and through the motif. This deconstruction makes up the mimetic actuality of his recent images. Like Paul Celan in Ademkristal (Breath crystal), Vanriet ‘abuses’ such ominous mountain landscapes to plant meanings that symbolize the unreadable drama of the past. Celan’s parents were murdered in a camp; Vanriet’s parents met there. A sour extending of hands in time. And for both more connected with deconstruction than with construction.

Stefan Hertmans, 1999

Translated from the Dutch by Maggie Oattes

Notes

[1] Jacques Derrida, La Vérité en peinture. Paris, Flammarion 1978, p. 178.

[2] See for example statements on painting made by Catherine David based on Documenta x.

[3] Victor Vanriet, Wenteltrap Mauthausen (Winding stairs Mauthausen), Antwerp 1972.

[4] R.B. Kitaj, First Diasporist Manifesto, London, Thames & Hudson 1989.

[5] Already criticised sarcastically by Vanriet in his triptych Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh, oil on canvas, 1989. The third panel shows an empty wagon that reminds us of the transports of the Jews: the peace is the peace that follows the mass murder.

[6] In his painting Es schwinden, es fallen, die leidenden Menschen, oil on canvas, 1989.