Painting is a profession, just like writing. You can learn it. But once you have mastered the tricks of the trade, you discover a new world, enthralling and fascinating. A world that draws you into further investigation of the ever-new possibilities that lie hidden in the making of an image. A universe, moreover, that encourages you to explore the visual thinking that goes with it. This is what you experience in Jan Vanriet’s work.

Vanriet was already an established artist when I invited him in 2005 to take part in an exhibition of the originals that served as the basis for his ‘Bible Images’, which he had previously presented in the Testamenta cycle. What affected me so much about this work was the way the artist had succeeded in crystallizing certain episodes from the Bible into a universal image – one that still connects seamlessly with the latest events today, without ever doing the ancient tradition less than full justice. We are the heirs of each other’s tragic life-cycles, which play out across the generations. But it was not only the message that struck me so forcefully: I also realized straight away that Vanriet has thoroughly mastered the skill of expressing himself in images and does so with remarkable versatility. And that makes him an extraordinary artist.

The immense visual power of Testamenta led in 2011 to the Closing Time project at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp. The museum boasts an exceptionally valuable collection of early and modern art: 140 paintings by Flemish and European Primitives, including works by Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling and Gerard David. It has Memling’s Najera polyptych, with its panel showing Christ and the Musician Angels – a slightly larger work than his famous Gdansk triptych. Foucquet’s Madonna of Melun is there too, along with a survey of the Antwerp school, including Quentin Massys, Jan Brueghel and Frans Floris. The are several dozen paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Jacob Jordaens and, in their wake, the entire School of Rubens. Plus Simone Martini, a highly intimate Antonello da Messina and an early Titian. An outstanding nineteenth-century collection is rounded off by the world’s most important body of works by Ensor. Not to mention other moderns from Van Gogh to a beautiful Modigliani, and the Flemish Expressionists from between the wars.

The museum is currently closed for renovation for several years, and so all the artworks had to be removed. The result has been a systematic and remarkable disorganization of the familiar configuration of the collection, creating space – both literally and figuratively – for an extraordinary experiment. By way of farewell to the artworks, which would be withdrawn from view for some considerable time, Vanriet selected some 170 masterpieces from the museum’s collection. He ‘explained’ his choices by juxtaposing them with paintings of his own. This was not a verbal exercise, therefore, but one that presented visitors with a visual commentary derived from a contemporary work. Vanriet’s modern-day visual language actually made this easier to read in many cases. Either way, a kind of wordless intertextuality was able to develop between the images: the artist clarified the visual questions he wanted the selected works to raise by emulating those questions in his own artwork. We might describe it by coining the term ‘intervisuality’. This very methodology illustrates how much Vanriet draws throughout his oeuvre on a collective visual memory, but also on a long-standing image tradition, with which he engages in constant dialogue. He understands better than anyone the linguistic nature of an image, and succeeds in a highly individual way in using this idiom to tell a story without the literary element upstaging the pictorial. The ease with which the artist compiled the richly varied selection for Closing Time can only be understood in terms of the diversity of Jan Vanriet’s work, which is able to illustrate the many facets of his profession, while also slotting perfectly into the long art-historical tradition of European and, more specifically, Flemish painting.

In his fascinating essay Sensual Painting, Historical Restitution, Stefan Hertmans situates Vanriet somewhere between Raveel and Tuymans. He deserves the reputation, the Flemish novelist writes, ‘of an obsessive and virtuoso painter who, independently of all fads and fashions, has forged his own philosophy of the unfathomable and visible image, in a labyrinth of endless variations showing ever-new turns, refreshing and deeply rooted in the memory of a timeless yet contemporary pictorial art [in which] tradition and innovation appear in each other’s guise.’ Or, as Eric Rinckhout – co-author of the Closing Time exhibition catalogue – put it: Vanriet not only offers the public a glimpse of ‘the eternal now of painting’, he also demonstrates the extent to which he himself is permeated with the ‘rules of art’, as passed down from one generation of European visual artists to another since the Renaissance. This is the secret behind the thoughtful innovation that so typifies Vanriet’s style. The art-theoretical reversal of Horace’s dictum ‘Ut pictura poesis’ – poetry functions like painting – fits this artist, who is also a poet, perfectly. Vanriet thus aligns himself with a long-standing tradition in art history, in which it is perfectly natural to use ancient iconographic motifs to lend substance to new, ideologically freighted themes. In so doing, the artist brings the iconographic tradition up to date. He adds a new dimension, as it were, to old Cesare Ripa – an Italian contemporary of Hans Vredeman de Vries, who is so admired in Gdansk – who wrote the sixteenth-century standard work Iconologia. Vanriet takes Ripa’s ancient symbolic language, with its complex, humanist jargon of emblems and personifications, and transposes it into new, contemporary and legible signs and symbols. He does so, moreover, with an unerring sense of decorum, constantly exploring the varying possibilities the traditional genres offer. This is where we encounter the versatile Vanriet, of whom the celebrated Dutch author Cees Nooteboom once asked, ‘how many Vanriets are there, actually?’ Because, for all its unmistakable unity, his work is incredibly diverse.

Jan Vanriet’s art, like that of the old masters, deals with things that are part of life, and he is not afraid to address the big themes. His work has something to say: it is layered and carries an ideological charge. But Vanriet also knows his classics stylistically, and he builds on a long tradition of seeking out the right form and the appropriate technique for it. As he explores the limits of art and illusion as an instrument, drawing in the beholder as he does so, he is therefore following in the footsteps of the old masters. No matter how sombre his message can be at times, the painter remains a playful type – a finder of forms, who expands his horizons in ways that can be surprisingly graceful, accomplished and light-hearted.

This is what the exhibition in Gdansk is about. The project is woven around the theme of destiny, which is a vein running through virtually Vanriet’s entire oeuvre. It offers a survey of his painted work in all its diversity: sometimes dark; sometimes cheerful and effervescent; sometimes oppressively tragic; sometimes idyllically poetic. Yet throughout, we are aware of a constant, familiar hand: the hand of a master who knows what painting means.

The exhibition opens with the grey image of a mother and child, Madonna. Closed Doors. The work comes from the Testamenta cycle, in which it refers to a modern-day ‘Madonna’ who has ended up in a claustrophobic corridor, where she can find no shelter, no open door. An illegal immigrant, trapped in a Kafkaesque situation. Vanriet uses the human figure here in a very traditional way as the kind of personification a Renaissance artist might have picked from a book of models. She is an emblem of the rejected human being, turned away in all her desperate isolation. The use of colour chills her tragic fate. We are witnesses, but there is nothing more we can do: she stands with her back to us.

This image is a traditional one in terms of its form, too. As part of the Closing Time exhibition in Antwerp, a version of the painting with a green background was juxtaposed with Jan van Eyck’s Madonna by the Fountain from the Royal Museum’s collection. It was remarkable how the two images inflected one another in terms of composition: Van Eyck with his brilliant, complex virtuosity, yet hieratically aloof – the Mary figure in her closed garden; and next to it, Vanriet’s mother and child, reduced to an icon and trapped in their endless corridor. The work also sets the tone for the exhibition in Gdansk: form and content in constant dialogue.

The next painting, Doubt, has never been shown before. It is nevertheless a somewhat older work from the 1980s, when Vanriet exchanged the drawings and prints with which he established his reputation for the medium of oil paint on canvas. The shift also marked a new period in his artistic career. Doubt belongs to a series of similar icons, which are featured later in the exhibition: Doctrine, Word and Demagoguery – each one an ideologically charged concept that provides a context for the Doubt which paralyses us as human beings. The image fits seamlessly with Madonna, in which the artist likewise uses personification – the human figure as metaphor. Yet the figure does not derive its symbolic value from its attribute – the writing or drawing pad held listlessly in the man’s hand – but rather from its body language. The man just sits there, as awkward as Dürer’s Melancholia. It is precisely this body language – the tried and tested communication tool of drama, but also, more subtly, of oratory – that makes the image so universal. It is the stance and gestures of the orator, of whom Quintilian remarks in his Retorica that ‘it is not surprising that all these signals, which are based on body language, make so much impression on our minds, when we realize that a painting, a silent work that always stands in the same posture, can touch the emotions so deeply that it seems at times actually to transcend the power of words.’

This sense of dramatic rhetoric is a constant in Vanriet’s work, but the style of Doubt also strongly recalls Vanriet’s roots as a draughtsman and printmaker, whose brilliant calligraphy enabled him to reduce his image to an icon. The use of colour and the graphic pattern also lift the image out of the anecdotal, while the addition of the letter places it in the tradition of that other mixed form of image and language, with which the work of the Renaissance painters was so permeated: emblem literature.

As we have said already: language is never far away in Vanriet’s images. Yet, to quote the Dutch philosopher Maarten Doorman, ‘his visual work is literary without being illustrative; it narrates without diminishing the power of the image’. This only becomes fully apparent in the works in which he connects with the grand tradition of monumental history painting. His subject matter is elaborated in these paintings with the multiple layers of classical rhetoric; yet they testify at the same time to the immediacy that can only be captured in an image. The theatricality of composition and visual direction enable the painter to achieve a monumentality that is impressive and enthralling.

Jan Vanriet showed himself with Decision Process (2006) to be a painter pur sang: aware of the unlimited possibilities of the technique, yet conscious at the same time of the power of the void. Decision Process tells the story of a notorious Communist Party congress during the Cold War period. The Party members think they are important and that their votes are going to write history, yet everything has actually been decided in advance. The reality of the situation reduces them to a flock of sheep, meekly allowing themselves to be rounded up and penned in. It is not a cheerful painting. Nevertheless, it does not judge: it merely shows, turning us into powerless participants in an event that might perfectly well have been our destiny too. This is something Vanriet does regularly: he visualizes how events suck human beings into the mass and grind them up in the flow of time we call history. This is the fatalistic vision of history as Geistesgeschichte that Oswald Spengler set out in his Decline of the West. Whether we wish it or not, we are its heirs. This gives many of Vanriet’s images the layering of a classical Greek tragedy, wholly in line with the rules of Aristotle’s Poetica. Unlike Aristotle, however, Vanriet no longer holds out the prospect of catharsis for the protagonist: he places the viewer in the role of chorus, the collective from which we cannot escape. His image has been plucked, as it were, from a film magazine of the time, but stripped of what was no doubt its original undertone of propaganda. In so doing, the artist gives shape in the here and now to a collective memory, which remains obsessively present throughout his work. The image in Decision Process is borrowed from the public domain, but – as we will see – it could relate equally well to an experience of the most individual kind, which a person wants to share in his or her existential isolation.

It is fascinating to consider how Vanriet reworks and sublimates a photographic source. He succeeds in stripping a newspaper photograph of all anecdotal actuality, by pictorially reinterpreting the image. In this way, he raises the dramatic banality of the picture to the level of a much more universal image, freighted and charged with new layers of meaning. It is a form of aemulatio of his source and, as so often, it is entirely in the tradition of the theories cherished by the fine arts since classical antiquity. Vanriet achieves it with natural ease and with a contemporary visual idiom.

That brings us to Song of Destiny, the exhibition’s title work. Rather than an event or story this time, the Song is an allegory. At first sight, it looks like a picture of people having fun in the snow. We look from a slightly higher viewpoint at an impressive ski slope, on which the people before us allow themselves to hurtle downwards. The bystanders look on – a mass of disengaged witnesses. The rhythm of their motionless silhouettes structures the space, lends depth to the field of view and form to the icy slope: they figure as a contrast against the ghostly, bare trees on the right. But it is the pale yellow of the tracks in the snow that draws our gaze downwards and lends dynamism to the bent-over people as they slide downhill. It is a souvenir picture, but with Vanriet, the image of the figures trapped in the act of sliding becomes a metaphor for the destiny that drags us along in an unstoppable headlong rush. It recalls a line from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall: as free people we have the choice between the fatal and the inevitable. Both are equally inescapable. To the well-read painter Jan Vanriet, however, the image also evokes Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem Schicksalslied (‘Song of Destiny’), from his epistolary novel Hyperion, which contrasts the destiny of the gods with that of mortals. The gods can rise above the world, but we humans are doomed to be thrown down like water in a cascade, from cliff to cliff. To quote Stefan Hertmans: ‘Hymn and elegy blend perfectly in this iconic poem; the interplay of good and evil makes history an indifferent given, is what Vanriet seems to suggest.’ Hence the possibly somewhat unexpected name of Vanriet’s canvas, which demonstrates yet again, however, how the artist in his creative process is entwined with the notion of the collective cultural memory of the Old World, and the scars that mark its history.

The fact that Vanriet is just as fascinated in all this by the fate of the gods is apparent from the carefree, festive impromptu A God with Child. Nowhere else does the artist display his debt to the classics quite so explicitly, embroidering brilliantly on the theme of the human figure as the point of calibration for all image formation. Although it is in an entirely different register, the scene belongs to the same line in this respect as the Madonna motif.

The collective body of ideas that Vanriet elaborates in his monumental history paintings contrasts with the intimate and individual character of his portraits. These brilliant likenesses are as personal and immediate as his ability to generalize his subject matter is strong when it comes to expressing universal human themes. The artist captures the essential features of his subject’s face and figure with the facility of the draughtsman, making his portraits both familiar and characterful encounters. The portraits of Simone and of a friend of Vanriet, the actress Annie Czupper, introduce us to this aspect of his virtuosity, while simultaneously highlighting his approach to the discipline of genre painting.

According to the traditional rules of the craft, to make a good work, the painter has to distinguish between history paintings – in which the artist uses grand stories and allegories to convey ideological concepts – and genre painting, which deals with life as it is These genre scenes invite artists to emulate what they observe as ‘mimetically’ as possible. The rules in question have since been consigned to history, buried beneath all the manifestos of the modernists. Anyone hoping to win kudos for applying them in the contemporary art scene is in for a disappointment. A personality like Vanriet’s, however, does not have to worry too much about all that: he is far too much an artist pur sang for that, and has no desire to play to the gallery of fashionable success. Artists who paint from the gut can lose themselves entirely in the possibilities for formulating a fresh view of things offered by painting as such.

The appeal of genre painting is that it invites artists to base themselves on simple things. Not grandiose ideas or stories, but concrete points of departure like a landscape, a portrait or a still life. The latter especially, in all its aspects, offers the possibility to approach an object or motif in endless variations from a purely visual interpretation. Just as a composer is able to modulate a musical motif inexhaustibly. In Jan Vanriet’s case, this often leads to the creation of series. As in his Vanity 1–3, in which the starting point was a vase of tulips that were past their best. To Vanriet, that is precisely when they are at their loveliest; precisely when they look crudely picturesque. An ideal state of affairs to get his teeth into. Nevertheless the image is layered too, entirely in the good, old tradition of the genre. The fact of the posy of flowers, which barely outlives the painting session, transcends the challenge of the form and confronts the viewer with the inevitable transience of things. Vanitas: what remains are memories, and those too gradually fade. And so it is that narrative remains present in Vanriet’s still lifes. Adding the image of candleholders with their burning candles to the series not only heightens the underlying idea, it also lends an extra dimension to the monochrome of the tulip vase. This kind of communication is difficult put into words, as it is so purely visual. Typical Vanriet.

Basing himself on the things around us is entirely natural to Vanriet, because they are vehicles of memory. In all their simplicity – a humble spoon, perhaps– they are to him souvenirs: they have a soul. Not in the sense of an animistic universe of the kind we find in Jan Fabre, say. No. It is the soul of human beings, who, as givers of meaning, are capable of bestowing a deeper dimension. His mother’s bracelet, for instance, becomes an icon of youthful memories, inextricably linked to a heavily burdened family history, marked by the global conflagration sparked by Nazism. Vanriet’s parents met in a concentration camp. His uncle, who shared their fate, came back so weakened that he died shortly after his release.

The Bracelet was the jewel his mother wore when taking her son to the variety theatre – Vanriet’s father was less keen on the shows. This was in the 1950s, when the crooner Rudi Schuricke was a big star. The Bracelet reminds Vanriet of his mother’s romantic soul. The theatre offered her a moment of liberation – she enjoyed the world of glamour and excitement, and applied her make-up in silent bliss as she got ready to go out. These were small instances of escape from the grey, post-war period, and for the artist, the jewel is the embodiment, as it were, of the special moments he shared with his mother. Charlotte Mullins calls The Bracelet ‘a talisman of enjoyment’, and Vanriet himself wrote a touching poem about those matinees at the Billard Palace, prompted by the painting. It is like a soundtrack to the image: ‘Rudi Schuricke singing / Komm zurück, / Komm zurück/ ... / Matinee at Billard Palace: / above our heads / a gilt spider chandelier / and my mother and I / we desire nothing more / than magic and lemonade.’

Was that the Coca Cola every post-war child longed for? It makes no difference. Because how fascinating it is to see how an object — in this case a bracelet – can evoke a whole world of associations, and how Jan Vanriet is able to incorporate that train of thought in the image he is making. Seemingly without effort, the artist elevates the still life of a trivial object, the size of a woman’s wrist, to a monumental canvas with the dimensions of a projection screen. Over and above all its connotations, this makes it also – and perhaps above all – a powerful work. The bracelet, with the coarsely-woven links that were fashionable at the time, becomes a construction, a golden fortress. The power of the painting lies in the composition and use of colour – two components that the master explores further in his Colours for a Bracelet and in the composition sketch Bracelet. Vanriet once again indicates intervisually what it is about: he demonstrates the realization process of his canvas – the skill he elevates to the level of art. But the format plays a part too. Within Flemish painting, it was above all Rubens, and with him Snyders and related artists, who best understood the power of a monumental still life. So in that respect too, we find Vanriet in the line of the old masters. Like Rubens, he plays brilliantly with every aspect of the genre, from the texture and tactility of the matter, through the construction and the poetic narrative of the souvenir of his mother, to the tragic tone of transience. Because his mother is no longer here.

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The world that Jan Vanriet holds up to the beholder is one lived very personally. As a result, there is an unmistakably autobiographical line running through his oeuvre. But this is not an end in itself: it is more a point of departure for the sharing of universal values. Personal experiences, perception and his own memories lend his subjects a truthfulness all of their own. The multiplicity of themes thus offers a framework, whether one relating to the Second World War, the horrors of the Nazis, the menacing atmosphere of the Cold War, or the catastrophes caused by stupid and totalitarian thinking. Pain and sorrow: it is as if Vanriet had to capture it all in a mantra of images, in order to process it and set it aside.

He often does so in series, as with Demagoguery, Word and Doctrine: notions that go hand in hand with totalitarian thinking, regardless of the ideology. Together with Doubt, they are among the earliest works in this exhibition, and are modelled on the same pattern. The artist begins with an abstracted form, which he repeats staccato: a leitmotiv within the evil of fundamentalism, which is expressed in demagoguery, word and doctrine. He uses his colour modulations as tonality for the subject, and the pattern of stripes, recalling concentration camp uniforms, becomes a grid on which Vanriet can develop his abstract concepts with symbols. The icy blue of Doctrine gives you goose bumps; Demagoguery makes the colourless mass almost palpable; and the Word, that ‘mighty ruler’ – as the classical orator Gorgias put it – is given a combative blue on yellow. Vanriet’s images become signs that take your breath away.

The graphic format, the stylized figure and the addition of the letter give this series a somewhat heraldic feel. The paintings are the banners of an encroaching ideology. Their interrelationship is therefore essential: the concepts are presented as emblems and are given depth precisely through their contextual relationship with the others, like poems in a collection. The imagery is direct: an oratorical gesture stands for demagoguery; the Freudian couch for the word; the iron, with which everything can be pressed smooth, for doctrine. Metaphors become iconic signs, symbols of facts or attitudes that the artist expects – hopes – we will notice with him.

The calligraphic painting technique lends itself well to the formulation of theoretical concepts as in the series with Demagoguery, Word and Doctrine, because working in a consciously graphic manner in the plane suits an experienced draughtsman like Vanriet. This contrasts with the series Emptiness, in which he experiments freely with the illusion of space. The painting almost takes on the illuminated transparency of a film screen and the image has something of the still photograph. The artist reduces the photographic image by thoroughly overexposing it, creating an eerie void. In the process, he makes skilful use of the centuries-old play of light and shade, which has been surprising us since the Renaissance, from Rembrandt to Whistler. Vanriet uses the illusion of physical spatiality as the context for situating the human figure, with which we, as spectator, cannot help but identify. The interaction that arises in this way results in a sense of three-dimensionality: the figure stands there like an actor on stage. Yet the lighting effects give the human characters a distant feel, as they have in Hopper. It is a defamiliarization that expresses the bizarre emotional state of emptiness. The following step in this visual association of petrified figures in a similarly empty space is formed by Emptiness 5, Rock. Human apparitions are reduced to lumps of stone. The starting point for the series was the disguised vacuity of the art scene in the 1970s, with the pointless aesthetic discourse of an avant-garde the artist disliked. Lifted out of that specific context, however, these are atmospheric images, which appeal more to the emotions. Whereas the previous series spoke more to the viewer’s reason, with a clear reference to the concepts that the works represented, in this case Vanriet invites the viewer to join him in contemplation: a Taoist meditation on plenitude and void, and our subjection to them.

The triptych with images from Berlin between the wars is related in technique, but entirely different in style and feel. A Shop in Berlin, Tramway and Berlin, The Salute are three brilliant, monumental impressions of collective memories of the kind of incident that can flash into the mind in fragments. We often know them from old photographs, and in Vanriet too they look like film stills: black and white with expressive lighting and an eye for optically enchanting moments. The images seem to have been taken from the great photo album of history, and evoke all sorts of memories of facts that, in Vanriet, should be read as signs of the time. He has written an affecting poem about it:

Omens

Nothing is absolute

Dark waters

bobbing swans

The blue thin horse

Twilight

over a veiled

misshapen nature

That man there

smoking on his bike

one foot on the kerb

He values the property

of the ones who left

with a treacherous sun

The omens were there:

they spilled the salt

they laid a hat on the bed

they threw ashes out

at new moon in the dark

Always best to look

the other way

Keep clear

of the storm

(Losing Face, p. 104)

The images here are composed in a very classical way. They fascinate us through the tension between the graphical element of the visual form and the pictoriality of the lighting, which reflects, brilliant and complex, or penetrates, bathing the overall image in a mysterious atmosphere. These works are nevertheless taut in structure and sober in expression. Vanriet deliberately refers, for instance, to the Neorealist stylistic jargon of the interwar years, and takes pleasure in appropriating the idiom for himself: the New Objectivity of Bertolt Brecht or the Dutch authors Bordewijk and Nescio. His mode of painting recalls that of Marquet, Picabia or Pyke Koch. Once again, he uses the considered reduction of the image to free his subjects from the anecdotal, lending the images a timeless character.

The Miracle offers a contrast with the intimacy of the Berlin series. It is a public history piece entirely in keeping with the academic tradition: painting whose mission is to propagate power and ideology, and a composition of the kind we saw Rubens produce centuries earlier in his Coronation of the Queen in the famous Medici Cycle. Vanriet is once again appealing to the collective memory, but this time with a degree of irony, since his painting shows a historical Nazi gathering, held long after it had become clear that fascist Germany was heading for defeat. Against its better judgement, the mass still goes along with the propagandistic pep talk from its leaders. An immaterial light engulfs them all, and in false hope, the miracle unfolds in which, despite the facts, they continue to believe. Fortune once again plays her role, and we as viewers bear witness to the inevitable.

History paintings of this kind tend to lose themselves in the descriptive details we expect of every chronicle. But details are not what Vanriet wants to recall. He is interested in the signs that people ought to see and which they all too easily overlook; and in human behaviour, which is timeless, and of which each of us must take our hereditary share. Vanriet sees signs everywhere: in objects that become symbols – the nails from the cross, which stand for suffering – but also in small actions or gestures, as in The Promise. Signs are there for those who want to see, but we often pay them no attention. We can point them out to each other, in which case they become metaphors of the inevitable, as in The Serpent’s Egg, Ingmar Bergman’s haunting film about the rise of Nazism. Signs then become the anchors of our memory, including all the tragedy and sorrow with which each generation saddles the next: children of war, perpetrators as well as victims. The processing of these historical traumas shapes the destiny of children and grandchildren, it forces Jan Vanriet to keep on making new images, almost obsessively. He himself says that it is a healing exercise: kneading and re-kneading his images – so that a new aspect of the memory is refined each time – he achieves a certain closure, which then makes him even more alert to the signs. He feels the destiny of the artist to be interwoven with that of his fellow human beings. This applies to the collective memory, but also to his personal, intimate sphere. It amounts here to transcending the individual and giving it a universal dimension. Hence the layering in Jan Vanriet’s images: you have the grand narrative, and you have the anecdotal; the monuments, and the souvenirs and little things. Vanriet translates them one by one into visual language, but they are processed and viewed through the filter of the refining process he knows to be his own life’s destiny. He sees himself as a craftsman, who works and develops using paint, composition, colour and line – the same way as his visual thought process unfolds. As he himself puts it, he follows the urge to make images: he has no choice.

Viewed this way, Jan Vanriet’s oeuvre is nothing less than a catharsis: ‘that oppressive and liberating identification’, as the Dutch author Simon Vestdijk called it. A coping process for himself, but also catharsis for a generation of sorrow, burdened with a collective memory that wants to – that must – express itself, because this is the only solution for what ought to be a general pardon. As a child of the 1950s reconstruction, Vanriet took upon himself the destiny of processing the utterly tragic moments that not he, but his parents, had to live through. The placing and situating of the collective injustice of history, of the injustice we have done one another as people, is a leitmotiv throughout his work – a task as inescapable as the destiny from which the exhibition takes its name.

Interestingly enough, however, the artist’s work is being presented here at a moment when Vanriet has finally worked through that sombre past. It is no coincidence that his most recent series of paintings in the exhibition, The Contract and Losing Face, are more light-hearted in structure and joyful in their use of colour, despite their grim themes. They mark a new turn, a new energy, in which the artist allows himself to be drawn increasingly by the play of forms. It is as if he finally feels released from his compelling duty and has found a little space for his own life and to recharge. He can now also give himself over at last to the lightness of forms and to their exploration. Such a transition places Vanriet in the line of artists like Rubens, Rembrandt and Picasso, none of whom had produced their best works by the age of thirty-five – as had Jacob Jordaens, say –but who may be viewed as late bloomers. Like Vanriet, they never stopped playing. Like Vanriet, they thus achieved a pictorial musicality in their late work, of which they had not previously been capable, because of pain, technique or principles.

And so it is that Jan Vanriet once again inscribes himself and his work within the tradition. We can follow his artistic odyssey across the years. The eminent art critic Marc Ruyters has sketched his career as a painter from 1966 to 2008. With the exhibition in Gdansk, Vanriet demonstrates the consistent progress of his artistic development. True to himself, yet surprisingly innovative and vital. And, in his acquiescence to our shared destiny, so joyful of touch and palette, and so hopeful.

Paul Huvenne

23/02/2015