But what remains is brought about by poets.
—Friedrich Hölderlin

The work of Jan Vanriet, one of the best known Belgian artists today, can be interpreted in various contexts, such as its literariness or its relationships with art history – as has been done many times. But the fact of staging his exhibition at the National Museum in Gdańsk, a city that witnessed the 20th century’s tragic history, where the Second World War began, and where a freedom struggle against the Communist regime continued for decades, determines its interpretation. In this particular context, a reading emphasising the exhibition’s links with history and memory becomes, I will venture to say, inevitable. According to the Gadamerian understanding of the hermeneutic circle, any interpretation, or, in our case, any gaze, is informed by the cognitive subject’s past experience. For a start, therefore, we need to admit that our gaze is not innocent, but rather influenced by cultural traditions, shaped in a specific language and in a specific space, a space marked by void and lack, both literally and metaphorically.

To substantiate this, let us look at the 2003 painting Traceless Wood [Spoorloos woud], showing bare, grey-yellow birch trunks emerging from a bluish, shapeless, and cool space. In this landscape, I very clearly hear the resounding silence, the lack, or absence that in this part of Europe has come to mark the memory of the landscape after the war and the Holocaust. An empty woodland, especially one of birches, is no longer just an empty woodland – it has become a symbol of millions of tragic deaths. Vanriet’s other paintings incorporating sylvan motifs seem to confirm the intuition. Birches [Berken], also from 2003, shows a forest, now symbolically reduced to several vertical lines, among which dark-hued human figures are visible. The artist has reversed the order of representation here, painting the figures horizontally, as if they were levitating. This gesture suspends their corporeality and tangibility; utterly anonymous, they become but a trace of human presence. Moreover, the eye recognises in them a token of death – forgotten human corpses, buried in the ground. Man in Red Forest [Man in rood woud] (2004) leaves no doubts – the fiery background, bringing to mind conflagration and death, the green vertical lines that may symbolise trees, as well as prison bars, and finally, lost in the landscape and barely visible, the outline of a figure, its shadow, or, rather, a memory of it.

Recent history, and the history of the Second World War and the Holocaust in particular, has a special significance in contemporary Polish and Central European culture; since the late 1990s it has actually become something of a leitmotif in the Polish cultural landscape, as if, after the collapse of the Soviet bloc, we experienced an excess of suddenly liberated regional memory. The number of movies, works of art and literature, let alone scholarly publications tackling history-related topics is striking, to the extent that their incorporation in artistic practices has been increasingly viewed as a trend, even a strategy. At the same time, the phenomenon may owe to an overwhelming need for working through a collective trauma that was distorted and falsified by the Communist regime. Being too young to have witnessed the events themselves, artists dealing with such issues today portray a mediated memory, a post-memory. Their personal experience is rather that of a meaningful void that marks our living in this part of Europe, a void that is painful because we inhabit it ourselves. Jerzy Ficowski, a major explorer of the ‘empty places’ of Polish culture, wrote, “The voids left by people are never empty. / They grow in all directions, going beyond / the territory of the living.”

This trend, very powerful in contemporary culture, should be viewed in the context of the postmodern crisis of European historiography, a crisis that was particularly clearly felt in the 1980s and 1990s, and which doesn’t seem to have been resolved. Today, researchers contrast the notion of History as an instrument and discourse of power with one that is sensitive to personal experiences and subjective testimonies. As a result, contemporary cultural studies have been paying more and more attention to the art of memory, as evidenced by a vast bibliography of works written on the subject over the last ten years. “All over the world we are witnessing the onset of a time of memory” , Pierre Nora wrote in 2001.

In this context, contemporary art appears as a kind of ars memoriae, following in the footsteps of ancient mnemo-technical practices by seeking places – literally and symbolically – for the mental images of things that we would like to remember or, conversely, that we would rather forget. Art works thus become “places of memory” as defined by Pierre Nora in his later works, i.e. practices and objects, external signs, the main purpose of which is to stimulate and sustain the memory of the past; in other words, its depositaries.

Jan Vanriet’s paintings are precisely such metaphorical lieux de mémoire where memory is objectivised and sheltered. His practice, leading us through the subjective traces and experiences, is not, however, a quest for a method of representing History. Vanriet’s gaze is neither focused on recent historical events nor a commentary on them. Finally, the artist’s method is not related to a fascination with media images or history-mediating archival materials (even though a painting may be inspired by an archival photograph or a movie, which, alongside reminiscences, images of everyday objects, and reading impressions, constitute a private collection of images stored in the artist’s memory). Vanriet’s mode of thinking history and memory is particularly interesting in the context of the Polish discussion about the local ‘Tuymans effect’ and Polish artists’ interest in Tuymans’ way of depicting history. In Vanriet’s case, the purpose is rather to study the functioning of memory, and, in a broader interpretational context, to locate a primal image that would make it possible to communicate and pinpoint elusive Meaning.

The presence of history in Vanriet’s work is motivated by family memory, which is intertwined with the tragedies of the 20th century. The artist’s father was a Belgian left-wing activist and a member of the WWII resistance movement. Denounced, he was sent to a concentration camp. His mother, also involved in anti-Nazi activities, was first sent to forced labor in Silesia and then to a camp. Vanriet’s parents met at Mauthausen, and it was precisely that impossible meeting which inspired the unique painting series, The Contract (2013), discussed by Charlotte Mullins in this publication.

For Vanriet, therefore, history is actually a deeply rooted background, a fabric, and the historical event preoccupies him insofar as it is embedded in his own experience, in his personal and familial memory. When we consider his work as a whole, there is clearly an auto-bio-graphical continuity to it. Yet this is not an auto-bio-graphy in the literary sense of the term. Sure, we will find reminiscences from Vanriet’s childhood and adolescence here, certain images signifying the constitutive moments of the various periods of his life. These reminiscences, however, are fragmentary, and while they can tell us much about the artist himself, their purpose is not to construct a self-narrative but rather to study the power of the different signs.

Vanriet’s historical awareness, bound-up with the history of his family, developed slowly. At first it manifested itself as a political awareness – Vanriet became a left-wing activist himself – and materialised primarily in literary work (the artist is also a poet and his main affiliation was initially with the Belgian literary community). During that time, Vanriet, the painter, appears to be fascinated with British Pop Art. It is only in the late 1970s, that his paintings begin to feature references to important historical figures (e.g. Tatlin), references that will be fully developed in his later work.

The fundamental breakthrough occurs in 1986, a liminal date, according to Vanriet. In a statement for an exhibition staged that year, he reflects on the “darkening mood” of his recent paintings: “I’m sure it is connected with a growing consciousness of the meaning of art, in a perhaps naive 19th-century sense, where art is didactic in its reflection of society and, therefore, holds up a critical mirror to express humanism.” This invasion of history coincides here with the definition of an artistic agenda, bound up with the realisation of history’s importance and the role it may play in society. As part of this agenda, a historical theme, connected with History or personal history, saved from oblivion, might, by virtue of semantic synthesis and a “critical gaze,” become a figure of the Ricœurian ‘duty to remember’, formulated by the French philosopher as the “the duty to do justice, through memories, to an other than the self.” I believe this postulate finds its full realization in the series Losing Face (2009-13), comprising portraits of Jews deported from Belgium to death camps, based on photographs preserved in archives of the Kazerne Dossin.

But let us return to the year 1986. This is when Vanriet creates two important paintings, The Doctrine [La Doctrine] and Portrait of an Uncle [Portret van een Oom]. The latter shows an accordion, lying on the ground and stretched so that it becomes an image of a factory. Railway tracks lead inside, smoke rises ominously from the smokestack, and the sky is fiery. The style is characteristically naive, reminiscent of children’s drawings. This is an allegory that is elucidated by the artist’s biography: his mother’s twin brother, who played the accordion as child, died from emaciation shortly after his return from Dachau. But the painting’s meaning can be understood even if we are not aware of these facts; the term ‘death factory’ springs to mind. Thus, the Holocaust becomes an underlying bloodstream that irrigates Vanriet’s work. Rather than its central theme, it is a shadow that casts itself on the artist’s successive paintings. Or, a bad dream that persists as an afterimage, poisoning our gaze.

The inhabitant of Vanriet’s work, just like anyone living in Central Europe, will have no doubts about the meaning implied by a painting with a blue surface, fading towards the top and revealing a sketchy railroad car. This is an attribute of the deportations and resettlements that the 20th century saw so many of in this part of Europe. Most of us will also recognise in it a symbol of the Holocaust of the Jews; whenever I look at this painting, I am reminded of Jerzy Ficowski’s words: “The railroad cars cars cars / had long run over the landscape to death / yet, posthumous, it endures impunibly to this day.” An inscription at the bottom of the painting states: Über allen Gipfeln / Ist Ruh (“Over all the hilltops / Is quiet now” ). This quotation from one of Goethe’s best known poems, considered, perhaps, the greatest German lyric poem, could be an allusion to the fundamental aporia of discussing our civilization’s achievements in a post-Holocaust era. At the same time, Vanriet seems to refer to the issue of silence, the now classic discussion about the possibility of talking about the Shoah and its representation. I think, however, that this touching on the most sensitive issues of European memory should, above all, be placed in the context of the “necessity of performing critical work on memory in the hope of renewing imaginative possibilities and reopening the question of the future – a necessity that brings art into a particular close, provocative, and mutually questioning relation with history.” For “to remember, one must imagine.”

Another important theme present in Vanriet’s work, associated to his experience of History, is the complex issue of the artist’s and, more broadly, the individual’s ideological and political involvement. Featured in this exhibition, the painting The Doctrine (1986) is emblematic in this regard: a portrait of Vladimir Tatlin, dominated by a pressing iron symbolising the destructive and homogenising power of ideology, against a background of vertical blue and white stripes. A viewer familiar with the history of 20th century art will see in the latter an echo of the work of Daniel Buren (himself a follower of Doxa), but a connotation with the stripes of concentration camp uniforms remains equally strong, causing the already crystallized meanings to start swelling. The issue of the individual’s functioning within a political system and within ideology, the 20th-century paroxysms of which show through in the successive layers of Vanriet’s paintings (e.g. in the abovementioned vertical stripes), is also present in the unusual painting, Decision Making [Besluitvorming] (2006). Reminiscent of the aesthetic of classic Soviet cinema, it shows Communist party members gathered at a convention. As usual in Vanriet’s case, this initial motif is advanced in the process of interpretation to a more general level, becoming an allegory of functioning within a specific socio-political system, where our individuality is utterly dominated by the regime. It is possible to look along similar lines at one of the artist’s most recent paintings, The Promise (2014), which shows a man in a formal suit, holding a stack of bricks. This wayward accusation of the Communist system (the painting is based on a photo of the Polish Communist leader, Edward Gierek, visiting a housing estate under construction) reviles all mechanisms of power.

For Vanriet, the tackling of historical themes is a kind of intuition, allowing him to identify crucial moments and places. The artist is interested in fundamental issues concerning the individual’s fate and relationship with society. His paintings are like Benjaminian vignettes, allowing us to recognise the past and immerse it in the present: “The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognisability and is never seen again.”

The seriality of Vanriet’s work and his virtually obsessive repetition of certain motifs are significant in this context. He usually takes his point of departure in fleeting reminiscences, in seemingly banal everyday objects, in family-collection or archival photographs, i.e. in the often mentioned by Ricœur, Platonic eikõn, an “image of something extant but absent,” in order to then explore the meaning of this original image by subjecting it to semiotic transformations, and to search for certain holistic generalisations, which, even in the case of a series of paintings, do not necessarily enjoy full supremacy.

Such a method may be indicative of a persistent, even fervent, search for a means of both representing memory and communicating profound meanings. As if, unwilling to accept the natural non-representationality of the great catastrophes of the 20th century, notably the Holocaust, the artist were reworking this impossibility in all possible manners in order to capture anything but the void. As if, through the endless declension of the “flashes of memory,” he were able to come up with a code to crystallise deep meanings.

Vanriet often compares his painting method to the writing of poetry, treating motifs, images, and colours like words that the poet arranges into sentences, trying out their various configurations in search for the most pertinent (most synthetic) phrases. Like in the well-known and often-quoted series showing a mother with a child, a contemporary Madonna, shown from behind as she walks in rags across the space of the paintings. Lost in cold, modernist corridors, or presented in front of geometric figures reminiscent of modernist urban layouts (inevitably bringing to mind the architecture of death), she becomes, from painting to painting, an archetypal image of suffering humankind, a figure of a homeless Mother, and an allegory of ethnic purges, forced resettlements, and all kinds of wartime disasters and migrations that have been a recurring motif in human history, even after its end. Our thoughts wander around those meanings and connotations, catching their glimpses, in order to then slip and float elsewhere, or turn self-referential. Any interpretation of paintings from this series is legitimate, from biblical to contemporary ones, offering reflection on recent catastrophes and wars.

Besides everything else (and working in series is also symptomatic in this context), Vanriet is interested in exploring the painting tools themselves, and the medium remains at the very heart of his practice, not theoretically, but precisely in terms of praxis. His paintings are aesthetic and appealing. His experiments with the painterly language, with form and colour, become an autotelic value. The formal aspects of each painting examine their own reflections and variations in other paintings of the given series, and the observer cannot help but join this semantic formal interplay. In his characteristic manner, Vanriet employs both abstraction and figuration, combining and juggling them, observing how new connotations arise and meanings are multiplied. He creates a unique visual language that couples and confronts elements and motifs belonging to different genres and orders. Oftentimes he also resorts to formal quotations from the old masters; an attentive viewer will find Monet’s method here, or Van Eyck’s green. Vanriet’s painting is at the antipodes of realism, its essence being to create synthetic and condensed images that the artist calls “mental pictograms.”

No wonder, therefore, that spending time with Vanriet’s works makes you sensitive to the expanse of associations they carry. The procedure here is the image – the reminiscence, the eikõn – and the associations open up a space accessible to further interpretative explorations, to the finding of new meanings. Vanriet’s artistic agenda calls for asking fundamental questions. This is evidenced by the show’s title, borrowed from one of Hölderlin’s more important poems, Hyperion’s Song of Destiny. Hölderlin is a poet on a grand scale, his vision encompassing the world from prehistory until the present; he also posits his own interpretation of man’s fate. Vanriet does similarly, making an effort and taking the risk, like the great humanists before him, to grasp Meaning. In this context, to study the functioning of memory and the possibility of its representation becomes the “critical act” that the artist mentioned in his 1986 exhibition-accompanying statement. The act of evoking is a quest, and in Vanriet’s work this act acquires a broader meaning: it becomes a quest for the truth about the human being. Perhaps, it is precisely this quest that is the Meaning. For, to paraphrase one of the greatest contemporary poets (a reference made legitimate, I believe, by the esteem that this essay’s protagonist reserves for poetry), “in our times it is not the final form (fine, ‘beautiful,’ ‘perfect’) but the formative process that is more intriguing. . . . Painting in motion, towards the unknown, still makes sense.”