Jan Vanriet’s works surprised and enraptured me. Previously unknown to me, his painting combines formal sophistication with subject matter that is very dear to me, i.e. the subject of a “wounded Europe.” Jan Vanriet—as I understand him—seems to believe in the aesthetics of the whole, which I too find compelling. He wants to record or, perhaps, only emphasise what is, in almost all of the countries of our little continent, the wounds of the twentieth century, the wounds of the war(s), of Nazism and barbarism—although, as in 'The Contract' series, a portrait of the artist’s parents embracing each other, he prefers to contemplate, not the cruelty itself, but rather the human reaction to it, the negative of evil. But he does not disregard that which does not succumb to history either; he does not pass over the world’s beauty, the world’s velvety skin; he does not forget about the trees and the flowers, about the innocent fruit, the apples and the figs.

He also loves what is surely the most important object in the entire visible universe: the human face, ever changing, full of meanings. He paints men and women. His portraits are full of tenderness, sometimes irony. They are not free from ambivalence, just as human faces are not free from ambivalence. In his portraits and in his other paintings, he achieves that “something extra” to make an invisible halo of poetry hover above the depicted person or object, the same that once hovered above the heads of angels.

Jan Vanriet rejects the unfounded, unwise division into “committed” and “aesthetic” art, a division that suggests that there are two realities, not one. No, there is only one reality, which is both 'political' and innocent. Perhaps, we will never comprehend how these two faces of the world are connected with each other, but that is our problem, not the world’s.

However, it is not just about comprehension. It is about individual works, about paintings. About gentle brushstrokes and profound thought. About the viewer (one of Vanriet’s favourite figures) standing before the painting to become someone else—for an instant.