Jan Vanriet’s Refuge (2015) plays host to a pair of ghosts. The first is that of another painting, Pyotr Petrovich Konchalovsky’s Portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold (1938), whose composition Vanriet here consciously echoes: a horizontal male figure, placed low, behind whom blooms an ornately patterned wall-hung rug. The second, nested within the first phantom like a Russian doll, is that of Meyerhold himself. When Konchalovsky painted his portrait, the eminent Muscovite dramaturge had lately lost his job—his theatre shuttered after his experimental, symbolism-driven theatrical approach ran afoul of the Stalinist authorities—and would subsequently be arrested, imprisoned, tortured and finally executed. It’s surely no accident that the earlier canvas, in which sobriety and feverish colour clash, suggests a man fatally out of sync with his surroundings and times, a man laid low. But now look at Vanriet’s.

Where Konchalovsky’s painting is powered by Matissean decorative heat, Vanriet’s shimmering pastel palette is closer to Bonnard’s, a dreamy light-filled haze that serves the artist’s inbuilt structural ambiguities. The man in the painting, who does not resemble Meyerhold, might be merely restful, asleep or deceased. One thinks, seeing his stretched-out form, of Holbein’s Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521); of the famous photograph of Kazimir Malevich in his coffin, overlooked by a wall full of his art; of any number of modernist images of individuals at leisured rest. And the patterning that rises once again behind Vanriet’s figure is no less polyvalent. It might be a rug on the wall or a symbolic emanation of a reverie; it may represent the regal structure of the subject’s mind or stand in for all that he achieved in his life. This is Meyerhold in the 1930s or it’s anyone now, to the degree that we all carry empires of sorts inside our minds, barely communicable. To call the environment that the figure occupies a dream space is not overreaching. The man lies with his head on a blocky pillow of sorts, but his body is not laying on anything. The room around him is dissolving into iridescent parti-coloured fog. Where is this, what kind of ‘refuge’? It’s an interior, but simultaneously a physical one and a mental one.

And so although Konchalovsky’s painting—with its evocations of artistic freedom repressed, the horrors of the twentieth century, and the stylistic verve of modernism—is a presence of sorts within Vanriet’s, one doesn’t need a back story to appreciate this work. His interest in the older painting had been snagged, he recalls, by an unanswered question, a potentially hidden impetus: namely, whether Meyerhold, by presenting himself in this sober manner, was cautiously downplaying his avant-gardism. Vanriet, conversely, began by imbuing the figure—via a change in scale—with less authority, a greater sense of being exposed, unprotected. He also, not incidentally, gifted this man with his own likeness. Whatever one’s degree of prior knowledge, what transmits is a conflux of daydreaming, death, jeopardy, modernity, the free movement of thought; and, more largely, the question of what an image can say (about the past, about interior worlds) and what it can’t. We’re tracking into a space whose contours are fading before our eyes and subjectivity must pick up the slack. That’s a tragedy; it’s also an opportunity.

Now this is just to sketch the dynamics at play within a single one of Vanriet’s paintings. But his works, even when they refer back to the art of the past—as, we’ll see, they not infrequently do, not least to show how much opportunity, how much room to manoeuvre, such echoing can offer—are also in further conversation with each other. No image stands alone, Vanriet implies in his returning to the specific motif, in his presenting conspicuously related works together in exhibition. Painting is like memory, like thought, worrying away inconclusively and compulsively at its objects like a tongue probing the hole left by a missing tooth. And so it makes sense that Refuge has a cousin, Indignation (2015), which again features a recumbent figure and a patterned rug, though the colour scheme has now shifted towards a toothpaste green and the painting has undergone an axial flip. It seems that we are now, perhaps, looking down on the figure, the rug having slid over him. And it is maybe no longer the same man—who is now in white rather than dark clothing, who is now awake and reading a book, so that the complementing pattern could once again be his thought, his literary imagination. There is a shadowy form in the lower part of the canvas. It might be something architectural or it might not. The book’s cover is divided, flag-like, between green and orange, and the painting carries an equally divisive title which, once read, places the work in a different light with extreme linguistic economy, one word tilting everything around it—a poet’s touch.

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What does it mean to paint in a manner related to poetry? Poiesis, the Ancient Greek root of the word ‘poetry’, means to make and to extend the world, and certainly Vanriet (who of course is equally a poet, and rare in being able to straddle both creative fields with conviction) builds pictorial spheres for one to inhabit. But the poetic aspect of his work, for this viewer, comes in his combination of the absolutely specific—the carefully selected, burnished and positioned image or grouping of imagery—and an acreage of open, interpretative, atmospheric space around it, one that is purposeful in that it actively encourages the viewer to navigate it, find themselves in it, and find, for themselves, Vanriet’s overarching themes.

Consider Moonrise (diptych) (2012), for me one of the most mysterious yet precise and consequently involving of his recent works. The left panel is, stated simply, a portrait of a standing man. It is a likeness of the artist, though that’s not hugely important. Vanriet, in conversation, refers even to his portraits of himself in the third person; rightly, because though each might have begun as him—because he was there to paint—it doesn’t end there. The man is dressed semi-casually in herringbone jacket, shirt and jeans, but he has removed his shoes, which he is holding. His facial expression is compound, swept with a mix of understated feelings: faraway, reflective, a little resigned. Again he is placed against a lushly coloured backdrop, a meld of pinks and greenish blues built up in shimmery layers. This man is something like a sentence on a page, fashioned from highly specific nouns and adjectives without being wholly declarative. And then beside him is a counterpart that is, however it might first appear, no answer: the other half of the painting, a new problem unto itself.

Here it is suddenly night. There’s a high horizon line with a black house on it, one window-light flaring. That light reflects in what we assume to be water, so that the house sits on the edge of a darkly greenish lake or river. The moon reflects too, peeping among the branches of an upside-down tree. But the tree’s positioning makes no sense as a reflection. Its trunk is truncated, rooted in nothing. You can’t analyse this and reach a satisfactory endpoint, only feel an atmosphere of spreading wrongness and try to make it connect with the figure on the left, who may now appear to have removed his shoes in order, himself, to step into dark waters. Metaphor? That way is literalism, conclusiveness, and this painting doesn’t ask for that. It doesn’t have a solution; it’s not a code. Rather it’s an open-sided place you can go to: a place, particularly if you have reached a certain age, which you might recognise yourself as already having visited.

In your stockinged feet you’re vulnerable. Maybe someone with power over you made you remove your shoes, maybe you volunteered to accept your vulnerability, maybe sheer life did that to you. In Striped Man (2015), painted a few years later (and the same year as Refuge and Indignation), we encounter another stretched-out figure, another echo of the Dead Christ—the epitome of mortality, for his time on Earth—though the subject isn’t necessarily Christ-like. The figure resembles Vanriet again, in a cap and striped sweater and striped socks. His skin is ashen, but he isn’t necessarily dead, and he’s positioned back in that pallid landscape of the mind, with its soft, glowing light. A cloud drifts in from the right, something like a pale blue jellyfish. We might know its long-tailed type from the quadriptych The Music Boy (2013), where comparable clouds appear behind the image—seemingly essayed from a cherished photograph—of a woman and a boy with an accordion, an image that suggests looking back heartbroken on some gone situation that is reduced, now, to a tattered image that isn’t necessarily the truth of the situation, trying to remember it rightly. All of which recalls, for me, Arshile Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother (c.1926–c.1942), but also so many experiences of trying to use photographs as portals. Only a painting, Vanriet reminds us, can contain both a photographic image and an emotional response to it: here, the yearning.

That aforementioned cloud is a little like a speech bubble waiting to be filled in, and the way that its type drifts from canvas to canvas is indicative, in the way that Vanriet’s shoeless figures are. They represent a fixation. They semaphore to the viewer that this is important without necessarily spelling out why. It’s another nudge. And at this point, in terms of suggestion, we might correlate Vanriet’s iconographic method—painting in a way that puts something forward yet also constitutes a kind of withholding—with his technique. Vanriet builds up his paintings in layers, and the strata of underpainting have, in his case, a polyvalent quality. In some cases they form glazes that gift the paintings with an internal glow; in others, the half-visible ghosts of earlier paintings both reaffirm the idea that something is being held back, and situate Vanriet’s paintings as a carefully wrought, crafted statement that has gone through stages in order to reach a conclusive point, like a phrase honed through multiple careful edits.

But to return to the shoes, and to what we might consider to be a key theme of Vanriet’s, one expressed sidelong here: what might be important about being shoeless? Again, it evokes the body—the artist’s body, your body—in a weakened, exposed state. So delicate, the body: such a fragile, temporary housing for the mind, for the evanescent self. This ambiguity is not, I think, just for us. I have the sense that Vanriet doesn’t always know fully why a subject—a laid-down figure, say—presents itself to him, beyond a keen and finessed intuition, a consciousness that this image reverberates and has multiform potential. Look over his recent oeuvre and one sees certain subjects recurring: again, a cloud, shoes, a certain bent-over posture. This approach also works rhetorically, as a way of defining what’s important without over-defining it. Consider Rabbit (2015). It’s Vanriet again (though, again, it’s not), and this figure stands in an aquamarine space that, for all its architectural definition, once more feels like not quite a room, or not only. Lemon light blooms from a doorway; the man is facing the other way. It feels a little like he’s staring into a mirror, but we are behind it, seeing him. Again he’s shoeless, this time also sockless. He wears a t-shirt and shorts, and his pose is a little like he’s about to dive into water, arms raised above his head. But his elbows are crooked and his hands, the title confirms, mimic a pair of rabbit ears.

Move from Refuge—with its overtones of Soviet brutality—to this painting, and one might think of Solzhenitsyn’s famous association in The Gulag Archipelago (1973) of innocents swept up in the regime with, yes, rabbits, easily trapped. (Mordant anthropomorphic transformations are of course not uncommon in Holocaust literature: think also of Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980), Nazis as cats and Jews as mice; or, though the analogy is different, of the menaced rabbits in Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1973).) But Vanriet’s painting is not so literal, nor bounded by a historical period. It takes wing in the relationship between the figure’s slightly childish pose and his serious, thought-filled face. The gesture is not far from having one’s hands over one’s head, as if a gun were pointed in one’s direction. It is, we can say, not a pose of dominance, but one of identifying with a defenceless animal—accepting, perhaps, that one is a defenceless animal. It’s simultaneously a picture of a man on holiday about to go for a swim, and a moment of existential realisation. In other words it reminds us that existential realisations can strike us at any point, even on the sunniest of days. Crucially, the painting doesn’t lead us to this awareness and then stop functioning. We come up with a way of navigating its equivocality, we travel down a meaningful path of thoughts; and when we return the painting is still there, feeling bigger than what we’ve put into it. It will likely take more, later.

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All of this interpretative lumber springs from a gesture, carefully staged in order to resonate—given leeway to do so. This is something that Vanriet frequently achieves, packing the dynamics one might expect from a group composition into a single figure, or—as we’ll see later—more than one figure conjoining to create a single syncretic image. In Bather and Mirror (2015) a nude man stands before (assumedly) a mirror, though he’s not quite observing himself. His eye, which he covers with a hand, appears bloody red. This is equally a formalist detail, for his whole figure is also outlined in red. It’s hard to say if the result reflects a modernist approach to shadowing or a wound, just as it’s hard to say if the black rectangle behind him should be taken as literal blank black space or as an evocation of some kind of abyss. What we might pick up, though, is the artist’s magnetism towards this action: the hand covering the face.

In 2015, Vanriet painted an extended series of canvases rooted in Cézanne’s motif of bathers—a motif that the Master of Aix himself famously returned to repeatedly, tuning it for more than 30 years. In one sense Vanriet here is inserting himself into a chain. Cézanne extended the art-historical tradition of the nude, and his Bathers are grounded in historical iconography: he didn’t like using life models, and so a substantial number of the figures relate to studies he’d made in the Louvre, as well as drawings from his student years. Vanriet, in turn, builds on Cézanne, reaching back to him across some extremely rocky territory. In these recent paintings, he draws particularly on Bathers (1874–75), Bathers (Les Grandes baigneuses) (1894–1905) and Bathers (1900–1905), though again one doesn’t necessarily require the specific art-historical reference to enter these works. We know that these are early-modernist bathers, and that they originate in the post-Impressionist tendency towards representing leisure. This is an approach that can, as the art historian TJ Clark has suggested, have political implications in itself, and certainly Cézanne’s bathers are not straightforwardly bucolic: for their pictorial innovations, they were considered ugly at the time, and have latent tensions in them that subtly register the alienation effects of modernity. But in Vanriet’s paintings of bathers, I’d say, it is the bliss and innocence of bathing that serves as a counterweight to everything that came after Cézanne’s time.

Cézanne died in 1906, and did not witness the horrors of the First World War, nor—of course—the hitherto unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust. Vanriet, looking back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, must look back across these vast twin abysses of the last century. (One should note, at this point, that Vanriet’s mother and father were imprisoned during World War II in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Upper Austria.) Vanriet insinuates the passing of time in these works in various ways: he revisits the bather motif over what we can see must have been an extended period, probing its possibilities in a manner that feels analogous to someone engaging with a memory. He also, in his manner of painting, appears to overlay the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century onto the nineteenth: consider the various Bathers paintings set at night, which seem to put pleasure into negative, to make the scene literally benighted. Or those, like Bathers, Blue (2015), that overlay a grid onto the curving bodies, imposing the geometry and mechanisation of modernity that would have its darkest expression in the Nazis’ industrialisation of human slaughter in the camps.

If this seems too extreme an interpretation, note that one of the bathers in this image appears to be choking him or herself, and another—a figure that Vanriet himself thinks is central to the array—repeats that image we have already seen, of a hand covering the face. It is as is if this bather knows, as if Cézanne knew, what is coming and doesn’t want to face it; or, perhaps more bleakly, can’t see what’s coming. Elsewhere, one looks at arrangements of nude figures under looming darkness and, once again, cannot help think of humiliated, stripped figures in the camps. In Bathers, End of the Day (2015), that curving cloud appears again.

Vanriet’s Bathers series is set in a mode of inquiry. It looks into the past, or into a span of time, with the aim of understanding it. It returns to past events, over and over, from an emphatic distance. It says, don’t forget. It says, I can’t forget, even if I wanted to. As such, we might view it as a continuation—not least in its push towards a particular subject matter, though not only in this—of the artist’s The Contract (2013), his poliptych of eleven paintings dwelling on one particular image, that of his parents reunited after his father returned from the internment camp. In this grouping Vanriet appears to want to use the photograph as a portal, a way into the past. His painting models the act of looking, of thinking. He closes in on the face and body, tints the black and white image different colours as if applying different casts of thought. He places the figures, once again, against those ambiguous cumuli. He edges the image at one point with what seem like the artefacts of a filmstrip, as if to emphasise that this is just one fleeting moment, one frame, in an evolving story. He zooms in on the figures’ feet and places them above an inverted red triangle, the symbol in the camps of a political prisoner. He focuses on those feet as if to discern some truth of reconciliation—or perpetual estrangement—through body language. The body language shifts a little from painting to painting, as if refusing to be fixed or decoded. This is not a series of paintings about what we can know of the past from images, but about the endless human effort to understand that past, particularly events as traumatic and life-altering as these. They represent, one might say, the act of the hand uncovering the face, insisting on looking.

For history is a swamp, fraught as it is with subjective interpretations. In his text ‘Sorrow’, Vanriet recalls that he spent teenage holidays in Czechoslovakia, in the spa town of Marienbad—a place whose name, of course, is now synonymous with Alain Resnais’ and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s 1961 film L'Année dernière à Marienbad, wherein what happened in a grand hotel during the recent past and what did not happen are retrospectively impossible to separate out. Testimonies conflict. Marienbad, by the time Vanriet went there, was already a palimpsest of histories: it had been visited by Chopin, Wagner and Goethe; and in this case Vanriet was negotiating with history too, making drawings after Gauguin and Van Gogh. (Closing another circle, his painting after Van Gogh’s 1882 drawing of a pregnant woman, Sorrow, which is in the collection of The New Art Gallery Walsall, is included here). We are forever arriving on this planet and coming to terms with the past: sometimes a glorious past, sometimes a painful one. The layers slip and overlap. In Vanriet’s Bathers there are echoes of Pointillism and there are stylistic approaches—the figure outline on a discontinuous, near-abstract ground—that look back to Postmodernism. This looking back, in the context of works that relate to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, is also a looking forward; and yet given that the paintings were made in the early twenty-first century, it is once again a looking back, particularly to paintings that Vanriet himself made in the 1980s. These new paintings thus seem to pivot around in time, trying to make sense of what has happened, registering unbridgeable distances.

In Bathers, Reflections (2015), there is a shape near the base that might remind us, again, of the inverted tree in Moonrise (diptych)—it is one of the forms that Vanriet returns to and mutates, a Rosebud, trying to make sense of it. In Bathers, Pink (2015), one of the figures is smudgy and suddenly upside down. You might read this as the kind of thing that happens in a sketchbook, but within a painting it accrues more deliberation, and points—particularly given that each of the three figures here is covering their face—to a world turned upside down. The delicacy of Vanriet’s work, though, is that such readings are never explicit. They feel like interpretations that the viewer has brought to them, as a way of pinning down paintings that are less machines for interpretation than weather systems. Vanriet knows that stepping back, rather than insisting on a reading, is more powerful (indeed, such insistence is inimical to art, and to poetry) and you sense that he does this because he would rather the paintings retain an evolving life for himself, too: that he also can return to them and feel the significance of certain motifs—like turning part of the body red, as in Bather, The Red Arm (2015)—coming towards a clarification, if never quite reaching it. In Bathers in a Comma (2015), a group of figures who are emphatically not Cézanne’s bathers but more modern-day figures are framed within a stylised comma shape that might also remind one of Vanriet’s long-tailed clouds. If history is a series of slippages and shape-changes, so might it be analogised in his art, which can remind one of the process of dreaming. Look at anything for long in a dream, and it changes shape: frustratingly, magically.

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The gesture in Vanriet’s paintings is of no fixed scale. Or rather, it visibly moves between scales, demonstrating that something domestic can speak for larger events. How capacious is Sorrow, whether Van Gogh’s or Vanriet’s? Sorrowfulness does not have a size, and one kind of sorrow—what happened to that pregnant woman?—can serve as the projective model for another. An image wrested from a historical painting can contain, when properly framed, an evocation of cataclysms that postdate the painting: this would be the case, clearly, in both the Bathers and in Vanriet’s Refuge. Equally, the largest of human stories can become ways of ventriloquizing one’s own feelings, and part of Vanriet’s abundant skill here is in not trivialising grand narratives by borrowing them. A writer, or an artist, needs a vocabulary, and part of creating empathy is by drawing on the common storehouse of narratives. Again, the story of Christ’s becoming human and suffering is arguably the most widely shared example of humanity’s vulnerability that we have, so if one is speaking of precisely that—mortality, weakness, the flesh—then it might be used, if sensitively, without making self-pitying comparison.

And so when Vanriet paints Wounded Hand (2015), with its kidney bean-shaped stigmata, then we might immediately guess that it is from a religious painting, but, more directly—because the Christ figure has been edited out—we feel that this is the hand of a fellow hurt human waving to us, greeting us, who are all suffering what it means to be alive, because there’s no way through this life without getting cut and bruised. At this point, too, Vanriet’s use of patches of red on his bodies is reframed—here is the deepest example of being, as it were, blooded by life. This painting would not achieve such effects on its own. It requires the—at this moment—supporting cast of Vanriet’s other works, the nudges they deliver, in order to get there; and when we move to another canvas, Wounded Hand in turn becomes a part of that supporting cast, a network of implication. The paintings talk to each other, just as they talk to the past.

Paint a person covering their face, or hiding their gaze, and you gesture towards everything that this person does not want to see. The first thing we might notice about Vanriet’s series of Horse paintings is that the human couple, presenting themselves like this—the woman in front, upright, the man behind her bent over—create a letter ‘h’, as if the painting were inchoate language, the beginnings of speech. The next thing we’ll be aware of, if it were not the first, is that here are two clothed humans mimicking a pantomime horse. On one level this is a study in a marriage, in shared activity towards a common goal—even if the goal is to pretend to be something else. Again, I’m not sure Vanriet himself knows fully what this image ‘means’, and in any case it’s only limitedly important what it means to him. Unquestionably it speaks to us.

In Horse (2015), the couple are positioned in paradoxical space. They’re on a curving mound that could be the curve of the Earth, but behind them, high up, is the moon (or is it the sun?) peeping behind (yes) a cloud, and reflected in water. A blue shadow—of the type that will reoccur in Memory (2015), a kind of portrait of Vanriet as himself a woman—falls over the woman’s face like a cast of thought. The man has his eyes down, his arms around the woman’s waist, as if she were his protector. What is he hiding from? What are any of us hiding from? Go from here, now, to Horse (Red) (2015), and the emotional temperature has shifted. Colour, Vanriet says here—as elsewhere—is both a clarifier and a destabiliser. The image is one thing; how we tint it another. And the tinting feels analogical for subjectivity. It says that there are two terms that meet each other in understanding, the supposedly objective image and the personality that we bring to it. None of it is fixed: it’s forever a negotiation. (Tomorrow, too, we’ll be a different person, and may bring a different reading.) So the pantomime couple turn red, then grey, then greenish blue, as if Vanriet wanted to imply this act being stretched out over time, over decades.

It is through such acts that the figures lose their specificity and gain something else. They are not this man and this woman, but relatively universalised, made over into a continuum. This, I’d argue, is why art-historical references keep shimmering in these works, from the Monet-ish tones in the icy backdrop of Horse, Frozen (2015) to the conscious echoes of Watteau’s 1719 Pierrot in Horse (Sundown). For all that these canvases, and these nods, pursue the traditional painterly approach of conversing with the art of the past—which, as we’ve seen, is vitally important to Vanriet, as to most serious painters—they also serve to situate a present-day situation in deep time, as if to say: this—whatever you think it is—has been going on for centuries, and will continue to do so. In Horse, Maestà (2015), the woman is now in the foreground, the man in the background (seemingly stumbling along), and she wears a fluted skirt whose reference point, Vanriet notes in conversation, is Piero della Francesca’s fifteenth-century Madonna del Parto, the Virgin Mary painted as pregnant. A momentary, zapping link, via pregnancy, might occur here between this painting and Sorrow. But by Horse, Maestà with Rug (2015), Vanriet has already moved on and set up a new set of connections. The blue shadow that previously appeared on the woman’s face has become, improbably, a half-blue sleeve on a green designer cardigan. The couple is now standing just in front of a rug. And so now one might refer back to Refuge and Indignation—and one might think, too, of the book in the latter, tonally split in two, like the woman’s clothing here.

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There is something nearly mystical in these correspondences, which are staged by Vanriet to feel like coincidences: associations that wink at us unexpectedly within a changing context. They suggest—not that Vanriet is trying to play God—a higher reality trying, in a murmuring voice, to tell us something. Which, in turn, feels like life: that we are players in a game whose rules are opaque to us, and in which we need each other’s support. It’s notable that in Horse, Maestà, as in his image of the stigmata, Vanriet takes what was once a religious image and quietly reapplies it in a worldly context. Religion might once have served—for some, it does still—as a way of making sense of the experience of being here. It might have explained suffering, as a means of being tested by God. Now, one might say, we are in the aftermath, not least because of how the idea of a merciful God was shattered by the extreme affront to such an idea presented by the Holocaust. We move in a world that glimmers with significance; but we can’t necessarily connect signifier and signified. We can’t even hold onto the past for lessons; it shape-shifts before our gaze. Jan Vanriet’s paintings catch all that, the frustration and fear and secret wonder of it. In the end perhaps all we know is that we’re mortal and here to go: that our bodies are deeply fragile, as fragile and fallible as our memories. Sometimes we can face that: painting and poetry, if we are open to them, are among the condensing formats that allow us to do so. And sometimes, because we’re only human, we just want to cover our eyes.