1

Writing about painters like Manet and Degas, Roberto Calasso points out that the innovative qualities of their style were not initially recognized as such at the Salons d’Automne; their work was either dismissed as incomprehensible or even inappropriate, or it was forced into a traditional frame of reference that was in fact quite alien to it. It is precisely this resistance to easy classification of painters who combine tradition and innovation in the most refined ways that should alert us to the fact that something new is going on, Calasso claims; the misunderstanding is the tell-tale of the not-yet-understood.

Nothing is as quickly exhausted as the artistic practice that self-consciously boasts about its absolute, unprecedented newness. Many of the Post-Conceptualists, who only sought to daze us with ‘the shock of the new’, are now hopelessly dated precisely due to their desire to stand outside all visual traditions, and their statements now strike us as all too didactic, patronizing even, and thus authoritarian – and that is exactly a category of the out-dated.

This insight first came to me, decades ago, when I stood in front of a work by painter René Daniels for the first time. While Daniël Buren’s endlessly repeated lines, or Carl André’s ever-recurring tiles were even then going through their own bruising battles of the argument, I was faced with work that in all its elusiveness and in the then despised ‘bourgeois illusion of the two-dimensional’, confronted me with the complexity of the perception of the seemingly simple.

The same thing happened when I discovered and learned to see the work of the late R.B. Kitaj – a most extraordinary and fascinating painter who was so mercilessly pulled to bits by his narrow-minded critics that he eventually took his own life. Kitaj was reproached with being a literary painter, worse even: with embodying the worst possible paradox: to be an intellectual painter. The reproach is hard to explicate when considering the work of all the great painters from the last six centuries – whether they be called Bronzino, Zurbaran, or Schiele. For two millennia now, Horace’s famed maxim, Ut pictura poesis, has been suggesting to the philosophy of art a secret bond between the images of philosophical poetry and those of painting. This relation, which is brought to its conclusion in phenomenology, has in fact never really changed.

On the contrary, when painting was promptly shoved aside as obsolete in the age of mechanical reproduction heralded by photography, the poetry of a workmanship with a philosophical slant that painting has always been, was buried along with it. But this burial appears to have implied a safeguarding of the secret, and the dialectics of art history invariably makes sure that what has been suppressed always resurfaces. Decades later, photographers working according to traditional methods, like Dirk Braeckman, would once again pay their tribute to painting in all manner of ways and thus restore the old bond: the representational philosophies of painting and photography both still presuppose the philosophical poetry of the gaze that can bring together what seemed distinct or irreconcilable in the eyes of the superficial beholder, and make the subject at once recognizable and mysterious.

‘Nothing gets closer to muteness than the wisdom of the painter’, Calasso also writes. This gives rise to a kind of hermeticism that amounts to plainly showing things as they are while stripping them of their immediate comprehensibility – enabling them to appear as new again.

If this double dialectics – of tradition and innovation on the one hand and of workmanship and insight on the other – is characteristic of a long tradition of painting (one needs but browse through the theories of the sixteenth-century Italian Mannerists to realize how firmly this dialectics is rooted in the Western way of looking), then the work of Antwerp painter Jan Vanriet is exemplary of that tradition. Erroneously regarded as an illustrator or a copyist, an ornamentalist or a documentalist by the fashionably blind, he has for decades held on to a project whose proportions have by now become almost immeasurable. At the source of the incessant stream of images he produces with a dazzling creative energy is a reversal of Horace’s maxim. What he attempts, I would claim, is to create ut poesis pictura: painting should translate that which exists in the words of the great poets, of language and recorded memory, into a pictorial art that, although it is entirely itself, still continuously refers to what lies outside its frame. This means that the physical appearance of the painted image always stems from a manner of synthetic thinking as it exists in poetry. Vanriet has thus since long sided with the tradition that with the arrival of painters like Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans has finally come to the fore: that of the painting consciousness that is not superseded by film and photography but is, on the contrary, one step ahead again. The way in which images from the vast array of reproduction techniques (photography and film) have found their way into the painting of the last couple of decades, attests to a more specific reflection on the limitations of the technical reproducibility of those modern media. In a single gesture, it adds to them an artisanal, almost intrusive innovation of the ‘familiar’ image (that which comes to us from photographic archives and frankly shows us: ‘You have never effectively beheld me, beholder’). In that sense it is impossible to speak of a ‘recycling’ of reproducible images because the pictorial reproduction precisely lets these images appear in their hidden meaning for the first time.

A remarkable process can be discerned in Jan Vanriet’s work: in all its aspects, the sensual painting method is melancholically confronted with the inaccessibility of the reality that is being pictured. In certain works this takes on an almost disturbing intensity, which in fact heightens the detached melancholy. Exemplary of this procedure is the unsettling series of paintings, gouaches and drawings based on Jean Renoir’s film Une partie de campagne, in which Vanriet frequently repeats certain images like film stills of some sort, reprises them, shows them in musical variations, with nuances in tone, colour, approach, size; transforming our attention for the breezy drama that is the subject of the film into something dark and fateful – the unfathomableness of the desire for the Arcadian life, loss of a first illusion of love, the airy and yet so ominous eternal Sunday afternoon as we know it from Cartier-Bresson’s photographs. So that the girl on the swing, in shades ever more strange, eventually reminds us once again of a girl who was to be taken off to the concentration camps of the Holocaust, by way of paintings with elusive figures in a sparse forest, whose trees, in an almost mischievous way, remind us of Binus Van den Abeele. Such clusters of associations are the hallmark of Vanriet’s pictorial universe: he casually brings disparate impressions together and leaves it up to the viewer to make herself guilty of the suggestiveness he evokes. The melodic displacement that is at work in series such as this one is characteristic of the research element in Vanriet’s work. He is a painter who has always thought in series, because the single object in its fetishistic uniqueness does not appeal to him. In that sense he has always been a kindred spirit of his great lamented friend Hugo Claus, who also preferred this Picasso-like nonchalance to the fetishism of the unique art object. Both denounce it as essentially uncreative; the creatively possessed transcends the constriction of the isolated work, the unique image, the isolated poem, because what he cares for is the process, and not the fetishized product.

As such, Vanriet employs a strategy of overpainting that does not result in layers but in series. Where paintings from the past often turned out to be palimpsests of overpainting, in Vanriet’s hands they have become pages that are laid on top of each other in a never-ending copybook of memory. That is an element of the Baroque theory of analogies: it is not the identity of the images that engages our thought, but the difference between an image and the one preceding it – it is also part of the contemporary ‘theory of difference’: the identity of the image and the work is not revealed through identification but through an endless differentiation.

At the same time, the multiplicity-in-unity is essential to Vanriet because he believes that the image always lags behind the memory around which everything revolves. In all the wealth of colours, in the light of cherries blossoming Japanese or in a southern patio appearing in the background: there is always a certain reflexivity in his work, light as air and ever more cunningly accentuated, often as if it arose from a careless gesture that makes all vitality somewhat ambivalent, while the painter never really seems to introduce this suggestiveness deliberately – that is how inconspicuous a certain line, a certain shadow, an erasure that robs everything of its self-evident visibility is.

In this process, a particular place is reserved for working with stencils, in which Vanriet goes much further than painters like Tuymans or Borremans; the only one whose approach comes close to Vanriet’s at times, is Koen Van den Broeck, though in his work the stencil is more univocal than in Vanriet’s complex allegories. For Vanriet, stencil and variation are mainly elements that philosophically reflect on gain and loss in representing and recognizing; they dialectically engage notions such as spontaneity and obsession, memory and evanescence, history and composition, all of this set against the background of the fatal autobiographical fact to which he has been chained all his life: his biographical origins lie in a romance set in the Mauthausen concentration camp, where his parents first met (one of the most recent series, The Contract, thematizes this somewhat wry romance). It is as if this fact has a lasting hold on his entire pictorial biography, and that this is the single image from which all the others stem, but also the reverse: that it allows new images to be covered with a haze of history that they have never truly known, so that the new can seem old and vice versa. Vanriet’s pictorial space thus becomes suspended in a strange, timeless frame of the imagination.

These seemingly endless series of images can only continue to expand by the grace of an almost Eastern equanimity that guides Vanriet through the labyrinth of his obsession. An openness towards the faintest impression, the most insignificant coincidence in a holiday snapshot, in a magazine illustration – everything runs over in that dark reservoir that comes into being even as it makes itself unreachable. Vanriet himself once called it the ‘rubbish bin of memory’.

Each image is therefore the only, unique and yet again faulty image. Each image is the negation of the last one, while it also confirms and varies it. Vanriet’s painting thus becomes an emphatic musing on the phenomenon of appearance itself: the image never simply appears as such, it is embedded, from before its appearing, in a sea of stories, perished lives, perished art, innumerable images from film, theatre and photography; in a single movement, form and content reject and confirm each other. The act of painting becomes an interminable process of starting and closing, of overpainting in variations. Hence also the total absence in Vanriet’s work of that frenetic concern for a consistently recognizable style; technique and approach determine the dynamism. He himself calls his style post-stylistic, not eclectic. We can encounter series of images in which Impressionist, Fauvist, Expressionist and Symbolist references alternate in the painting of an identical scene. ‘Eclectic’ was a term from the second, twentieth-century, Mannerism. It denoted a deliberate postmodernist mirroring of images and detached itself in a falsely sovereign way from the painted object. With Vanriet there is never any trace of this false sovereignty, this disregard of the model in favour of the concept. On the contrary, attentively watching, he remains the matter painter who loves and explores, who creates darkness by evoking light and reveals, in the broad light of day, that the visible is dark with memory – because this is what a critical approach to matter inspires. As such, elegance and melancholy, these very hallmarks of Vanriet’s painting, are at the service of this meditation on the limits of what can be shown – while what is shown always suggests more than what can be seen. There can be only one answer to the erosion looming in the mass of images currently flooding our world: alertness, from brushstroke to pencil line, in each gesture demanded by the pictorial act. The virtuosity with which this is done is never casual but always ‘industrious’, in the Latin sense of the word industria: what we see is an unwearying diligence, an unremitting search for the premises of a contemporary art of painting.

At times this entire complex process is rendered with such delicate touch that it recalls the scanty, sublimely clumsy strokes of the virtuoso Bonnard.

The question arises, then, whether Vanriet intends his varying series, large portraits, paintings of objects and landscapes, self-portraits and what not ironically. The only irony in his work, he says, lies in the fact that he is pleading a lost case: to make visible what only allows itself to be seen in luminous glimpses. In that sense what is at the heart of the entire existential project of painting is a kind of self-realization through the evasion of the definitive image. The only thing that can be attained is the temporary appropriation in the act of painting itself – an appropriation that is undone each time the paint has dried, the work has been put aside and the new day asks for a continuation of the interminable process.

Nowhere this process is made clearer than in the portraits of victims of war, at times reminiscent of Gerhard Richter, to which the painter adds an almost idyllic touch of light: this is what it must have looked like once, before history caught up with them. No passport photo can ever repeat the light that fell across their unsuspecting faces – faces that sometimes recalled the look of nouvelle vague film stars in an unintentionally ironic way. In this apparently unintentional irony, in these glimpses of the accidental and fateful process of time, memory and association, Vanriet has become a master over the years, a virtuoso painter who has developed an enormous technical and conceptual refinement. He has always made use of the Flemish clear line, known since Van Eyck; the subtlety of his hand is a result of the pressure of the pencil, the sensual touch of the brush, and not of a preconceived dramatic staging. This makes him a part of the great tradition of contemporary Flemish painting, somewhere in between Raveel and Tuymans. It is time that the world of contemporary art realizes this and gives Vanriet’s oeuvre the place it deserves: that of the work 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. A timeless pertinence as it is also evident in Degas’s work, the kind of painting in which, as Roberto Calasso realized, tradition and innovation appear in each other’s guise.

2

When, in art criticism, a painter’s work is labelled as ‘literary’, this often seems to entail an almost pityingly worded repudiation: it implies that the visual power of the work suffers under the painter’s literary erudition, with the work becoming ‘too theoretical’ as a result. This in fact implies a global condemnation: the referential nature of the work is considered to signal a lack of visual power or, worse still: the very interest for literature that the painter shows is seen as standing in his way towards a pure visual language. In the context of Vanriet’s work, the qualification as ‘literary’ refers to something else altogether. For in constructing his series of images, Vanriet precisely works in an image-supporting way, with the poetical means of a poet (i.e. as the poet he in fact also is). One of the techniques at the poet’s disposal is that of accumulating meanings and motifs until an allegory arises that is larger than the sum of its symbolic parts. Specifically, this means that a certain signifying element turns up in different contexts within an open or closed series, becoming ever more multivocal. This is what Vanriet does when he refers to historical circumstances rather explicitly in certain paintings, in order to present a series of images that are hard to pinpoint at first glance.

Exemplary are works such as De ziener (‘The Seer’), Hanussen and Mephisto. Erik Jan Hanussen was a remarkable character who presented himself as a Danish aristocrat but was in fact a Moravian Jew named Hermann Steinschneider. He started his career as a journalist but soon made a name for himself as a notorious hypnotist and astrologer. In that capacity he was able to enthral many people – including Adolf Hitler. Hanussen is said to have personally instructed Hitler in the use of techniques from hypnotism and mass psychology in his speeches. During one of his séances he is also rumoured to have foreseen the ‘burning down of a large official building’ – i.e. the Reichstag fire – a prophecy that made him dangerous in the eyes of the SA. Hanussen was murdered in 1933, in all probability by SA men under the orders of Goebbels or Göring, who would have felt threatened by Hanussen’s influence over the Führer. Hanussen’s head crops up unexpectedly in Vanriet’s pictures, tellingly as an oppressive close-up of a pair of abysmally black eyes that seem to encroach upon the viewer hypnotically close. The guilt, the hypnotic magic, the fascination and the horror are tightly interwoven in this psychologically refined image – that refuses to become a portrait and yet is one in all senses: a synecdochic character portrait of paradoxical traits. The close-up of Hanussen’s eyes is characteristic of Vanriet’s attitude towards the Second World War and the Holocaust, in which his own origins lie entangled: repulsion and inescapable fascination, hypnosis and menace. In portraits like this one Vanriet paints in a relaxed and loose way, his brush technique taking on a sketch-like quality, and because the subject at hand is such a delicate one, this liberty of painting assumes a certain sovereignty, but also a provocativeness. The effect of such work also lies in something else: in the way this gaze reverberates in other pieces. The gaze of the Nazi hypnotist also recalls that of Pontius Pilate in the picture of the same name, and the effect becomes even more intense the moment one recognizes in this Pilate the face of the infamous Nazi leader Heydrich … Moreover, the imputation comes to be part of our own gaze after a while, charging our perception of as innocent an object as an old-fashioned spoon in the next picture with suspicion (has the spoon been delved up from the belongings of camp victims? Is it a spoon Vanriet’s parents brought back from Mauthausen, or is it an image of all the horror that came to hide in even the smallest of things? Losing a spoon meant the world in the camps.) This accumulation of meaning is deliberately and often subtly directed and built up by Vanriet. It makes the viewer complicit in a kind of visual paranoia as it were, but also in a form of trauma processing.

The same thing occurs when Vanriet names a close-up of a face in pale make-up Mephisto. Once again there is the dark gaze, indicated by just a few lines. The rigidity of the portrait suggests a lack of warmth, of empathy. The cropping and framing have an unsettling effect; the face is more like a mask devoid of all emotion. Yet the conspicuously red mouth suggests sensuality, while it remains rigid and emotionless. The masklike face thus assumes an elusive quality: this is the portrait of a man who is not to be trusted. Mephisto is of course also the title of Klaus Mann’s famous novel based on the life of Gustaf Gründgens, one of the most famous twentieth-century German actors. As a celebrated actor, Gründgens was able to continue his career under the Nazi regime and was even protected by Goebbels himself. His most famous role was that of the Mephisto character in Goethe’s Faust. Gründgens was a fascinating, erudite figure, which makes his position all the more striking. To Klaus Mann, Gründgens was the prototype of the ambiguous artist under a dictatorship, who claims to be living entirely for his art while using this false neutrality for his own profit, an attitude that ties him to the regime and effectively makes him a collaborator. This scenario in itself is completely Faustian: Gründgens is the man who ‘became’ his star role. When we see the gazes of Pilate/Heydrich, Gründgens, and Hanussen juxtaposed, we discover the underlying continuity in Vanriet’s strategy of semantic accumulation. What emerges is a subtly painted narrative of gazes, characters, emotions, and this also makes a purely pictorial story visible – the story of related, cross-referencing brush strokes, palettes, treatments. These three paintings thus become a little series in itself, although they are not presented as such. With this as a starting point, the viewer can set out in search of parallels, both thematic and pictorial ones. The gaze of the Oorlogsmadonna (‘War Madonna’), for instance, cannot differ more spectacularly from these three cruel male gazes: shimmering in her eyes are light, openness, hope, vulnerability, joy even, affirmation of life. Her mouth, so entirely different from the tightly shut lips of Mephisto, is slightly opened and there is a gleaming light on her lips as subtle as in a Vermeer. The unmistakeable love speaking from this modern-day Madonna can be deciphered when we look at the photographs Vanriet recently posted on his Facebook profile: the haircut and features are those of his own mother, who spent years in detention centres and camps (Ravensbrück and Mauthausen). This War Madonna then becomes the chiffre of Vanriet’s personal ‘mania’ with this kind of subject, and allows us to understand why these ‘women from the forties’ keep cropping up in his work. In this sense the painting of maternal figures concerns the question of his own existence. It is through the confrontation of this image with the Nazi men that the entire story of vulnerability versus cruel, brute power is told. From here we can go deeper into the story: the Jewish girl, the Drie meisjes (‘Three Girls’), Sonja, De drie gratiën (‘The Three Graces’) and the Woman from Graz all conspicuously have that same haircut so fashionable in the nineteen-forties. They are icons of the suffering that in times of war, and specifically the Second World War, is personified in woman. They are avatars of the maternal figure, icons in the event that one does not survive, that one becomes one of those countless faces vanished in the mass graves of the camps. This is in fact how a number of portraits almost explicitly present themselves. Once again we are invited to search for parallels in pictorial method and approach. A scene with three figures, seen on the back and almost disappearing in a grey fog that is hard to define, with the innocent title Promenade then becomes enough to evoke associations with the walk of prisoners, of camp victims, but just as easily of three boys in unspecified uniforms. A round dance of squatted figures in De kring (‘The Circle’) may seem playful, but the women’s forties haircut propels us into the same historical circle of associations: these are probably women being given ‘an airing’ in the prison or camp. A Madonna in front of closed doors, the figure of a present-day asylum seeker seen on the back, does not only refer to the Jewish women wandering about, but also to Mary looking for shelter in Bethlehem, but the motif is painted in so many variations that it breaks free from its subject and becomes a study of form fitting in with the other studies of human postures and portraits. In this manner, an intrinsic suggestiveness emerges throughout the entire oeuvre, with allegory transcending the series of depicted scenes ever further.

In relation to his novel Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald spoke about the fact that art – literature in his case – offers the only possibility for at least partial restitution for past suffering. ‘Restitution’ is the key word for everything that is ‘more than the sum of the parts’ in Vanriet’s allegory, it is the secret kernel of his entire pictorial activity: to offer restitution for the dark history that contains his personal origins.

Another example of Vanriet’s way of dealing with the past, literature and memory can be seen in the relation between the works Song of Destiny and Schicksalslied. The second title is an explicit reference to the famous poem of the same name included in Friedrich Hölderlin’s epistolary novel Hyperion, which is why it is also known as Hyperions Schicksalslied. The letters in the novel are written by Hyperion to his friend Bellarmin, with the former representing the hero of Greek Antiquity (‘hyperion’ can be translated along the lines of ‘descendant of the elevated’), and the latter standing for the Ur-German hero Arminius (Hermann) who defeated the Roman army in a battle known as the Hermannschlacht, and is regarded as the founder of Germania. Arminius, Hermann, and Germania are all etymologically cognate. The name ‘Bellarmin’ thus means something like ‘the fair German’, with the Latinate ‘bel’ referring to the French and thus also the French Revolution, to the ideals of which Hölderlin adhered. The novel celebrates the ideals of the French Revolution against the background of the Antique Greek ideals, translated to a Germanic context. It is this obsession with a German renaissance by way of the Greek city-state that was to become so fateful for German ideology. Hence the fact that the ‘song of fate’ is also related to the motif we are dealing with here. The painting Schicksalslied is a classic example of the way in which Vanriet is able to attain an almost purely graphic effect with pictorial means while playing with a literary motif. At first glance, the picture shows black, stencil-like figures against a white background, some of whom are sliding down a ski slope in the foreground. Surrounding them is a scattered crowd, people with profiles clearly referring to clothing from the first half of the twentieth century. In the left foreground in particular, the partly averted crowd is packed together in a black smudge. This alone, this gradual swallowing up of a scattered crowd in a dark stain, has an ominous effect. The scene in itself is thus already complex and ambivalent. But the Hölderlin-referencing title, with its implications of hope and fate, makes the work unsettling. The poem, that is, sings of the fate of the gods, contrasted with that of man: in their perfection the gods stride high above the world, but man has no choice but to be thrown down, like water from cliff to cliff. Hymn and elegy blend perfectly in this iconic poem; the interplay of good and evil make history an indifferent given, is what Vanriet seems to suggest.

In the painting entitled Song of Destiny – the translation of ‘Schicksalslied’ – we see something else entirely: a seated figure, bent forward so deep that the head disappears between the arms. But because anatomically there is really no position in which the head can entirely disappear behind two arms resting on the ground, it seems as if the figure has no head (the face is barely visible between the arms). Yet the position is unmistakably connected with humility, mourning, inwardness. Mourning without a head – how accurately this expresses Hannah Arendt’s idea that one cannot grieve over the suffering of the Holocaust, because that suffering is too enormous to be comprehended – one can only grieve over individuals, over the fate (‘Schicksal’) of people one has known. The nameless suffering is embodied in this somewhat monstrous figure. At the same time, this does not seem to be a human body, but a bronze figure, resting on a kind of ice sheet; even the light pedestal seems transparent, made of ice. The play of the light is nothing less than imposing, almost merciless, as if the figure is burdened down with this excess of cold, harsh light. Song of destiny, the modern Hyperion bending and holding on, in a body that in fact quotes a sculpture by the untimely deceased German artist Wilhelm Lehmbruck (Der Gestürzte – in Lehmbruck’s piece, the head is indeed visible in its entirety). In addition, Vanriet adds a red glow to his painted sculpture, desolately glowing in that thin atmosphere … The complexity is enormous, the allegory itself plunges into an evanescence that is painted all the more acutely and accurately. This is how the poet that Vanriet also is deals with literary motifs in his work: they support, construct a tightly interconnected entity, and at crucial points they deconstruct themselves as it were, to become purely pictorial motifs again in a continuous study of forms.

A poignant apogee of this method consists of the seemingly anonymous catalogue of portraits – the anonymity arising despite, or precisely because of the first names that, as many of them ring Jewish, appear to refer to victims of the War: from Abraham, Chaja, Esther and Gertrud to Isaak, Israel, Juda, Rachel, Ruzena and Uscher, all the way down to the politically correct German name of the assimilated Wolfgang. This gallery of faces is indeed disconcerting; the expression on the face of Anna K is at once so piercing, captivating and beautiful that one comes near to personally mourning for this woman with the ecstatic expression – a present-day Madonna in every way. Even in this somewhat stern series, that reads like a recitation of a Kaddish for the dead, all manner of fascinating pictorial things are at play, unfolding like a melodic variation – an epicedium it certainly is, but it is also dynamic, and the pictorial delight and virtuosity burst forth radiantly from this tragic series of faces.

This brings us to the deepest ambivalence of this painting-as-restitution for what can never be amended, with which I also started this essay: the clashing of the often tragic subject with the enormous vitality, inventiveness, the sensuality and the joy of painting that propels Vanriet through this gallery of memory. This well nigh schizophrenic dynamism contains the core of Vanriet’s commitment – he who is not afraid, not even after so many of these melancholically intimistic poignant portraits of victims, to paint a Japanese cherry in bloom so exuberantly and large against a radiant blue background, that it assumes an almost Japanese transparency. It is precisely this provocative transparency, in its complex, deceptive appearance, combined with that obsessive study of forms and variations, that contains the truth about all remembrance in and through art. It is the same transparency that speaks from the literature that Vanriet seeks out, evokes, reflects in his pictorial vitality: the memento mori is a triumph of art, the elegy is really a hymn, as in Hölderlin’s Song of Destiny. Irony has nothing to do with it; an understanding of the inescapable ambivalences of memory and creation all the more so.

That is why Vanriet’s oeuvre is direly in need of its own restitution: his work is entitled to a place in between Raveel and Tuymans, as the impressive testimony of a great and passionate painter.