Each visit to the Belgian artist Jan Vanriet (Antwerp, 1948) makes an impression: his extensive studio in the heart of Antwerp on the ground floor of an old building with rooms for painting, drawing, trial displays – and on top of that a photo archive that is as large as it is well organised. Only a street further is his home, a four-storeyed town house with a spacious balcony and a heavenly garden that grows exuberantly in spring. Little seems to affect the cosy, almost traditional European world, looking from the gloom of a few paintings to the generous, elegantly furnished residential rooms, flooded with light.

Vanriet is a visual artist and an author. He himself keeps his work in the various disciplines separate and has never switched from one artistic profession to another, unlike his Belgian colleague Walter Swennen. And yet both strands define his work. Just like vanishing points, they add structure to his entire artistic oeuvre. Seeming to suggest that Vanriet the painter could be a figment of his own imagination – a study to be confirmed by the multitude of self-portraits. Painting and literature connect directly via the artist’s friendship with authors such as György Konrád, Cees Nooteboom, Adam Zagajewski or Stefan Hertmans; each of them could publish about his works of visual art. However the opportunity also arises to connect Vanriet’s work with further literary practices of the 20th century.

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At its core is Vanriet’s personal life story, or rather – similarly to his Antwerp colleague Luc Tuymans – the vicariously experienced horrors of the Second World War, said to have marked his parents in a literal sense, and thus the life of the artist himself. Like a black hole, Vanriet draws pictures from the whirlpool of a real and imagined past, and the Misleading Sun exhibition too revolves around this empty core. Objects, faces, landscapes, interiors and even more objects appear spookily, fragmentedly, to just disappear again – sometimes visual signs with a banal impact to represent the ineffability of what is described. With Vanriet, semantics and semiotics, the descriptive and the described develop into a threatening, irresolvable interplay, similar to how a minor sixth in music describes a never-ending loop.

The starting point of the exhibition of selected works at the Byzantine Museum in Thessaloniki is a reduced series of ink drawings: A Guard in the Sun consists of 25 sheets, on which Vanriet reproduces the contours of a Mauthausen camp guard snoozing in the sun. Mauthausen is the place where Vanriet’s parents were imprisoned. It was also the place to which Jews were deported, a concentration camp, from Thessaloniki’s station, as well as the place that thanks to Mikis Theodorakis’ Mauthausen Cantate became a musical monument in Greece. Sprawled on a chair next to a colleague, the guard seems to have lost his harsh posture which the tight corset of being awake, of purpose and of doing one’s duty usually forces him into. Vanriet’s graphic registration on paper, his notation, are an emphatic, desperate struggle to depict Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil, shown in its pure form here.

Reflecting the mechanism of repetition, the method of industrial destruction and production, the series however also depicts the impossibility of the endeavour, so that in principle the question of whether the horrors can be depicted is raised, around which the lifelong work of Gerhard Richter also revolves. However, Vanriet’s artistic practice is less dedicated to an analytical exorcising of idioms of style and visual power, than was the case for his peers influenced by the conceptual tendencies of art in the 1960s and 1970s. On the contrary, Vanriet is interested in the affirmative potential of picturesque paintings, in their effect and impact as instruments to reach the beholder, wanting to give his paintings a certain tone – an ambiance that is constantly felt, similar to the bassline in music.

But all this is based on work, because, as one says in Germany, work makes work: all the themes and issues present in this oeuvre constantly lead to new work. The way Vanriet varies his motives and themes until they fit, both in his free artistic activity and in his practice as a commission painter. Overall, the way in which Vanriet constantly creates new paintings fits less in the Belgian heroic tradition of the medium. Rather, Vanriet works with the skilful, technically assured accuracy of a poet, who polishes his words and sentences. In this way Vanriet’s work constantly comes forth from itself, as is most recently the case in two new works following on from A Guard in the Sun, in which the artist has once again taken on the Mauthausen camp guard, for follow-up as it were. It is an appropriate paradigm for the fact that history is not a static parameter for Vanriet. It is open-ended, to be presented time and again – to make the trials and tribulations, the twists of the past understandable, but the present equally so. Such a kaleidoscopic principle also forms the basis of Elegy, a painting started in 2019 which as of now is 220 small, framed paintings.

Similar to the author Alexander Kluge who in his Chronical of Feelings describes the Second World War as a kaleidoscope of everyday memories, Elegy is created from historical traces pertaining to the siege of Leningrad, for which Vanriet interprets a multitude of photographs and archive materials. His intention in this series is to showcase not only the aggression of the National Socialists, but also that of the Stalinists. Lamp, for example, appears to be a constructivist composition, but actually shows the desk lamp of a NKVD (Soviet secret police) agent during questioning. Lupins, painted in a lighter, softer colour palette, refers to famine when plants and flowers were sometimes the last remaining foodstuffs. In The Decision Process, emissaries meet for ritualist appearance’s sake to take decisions already taken long ago. Jolly Fellows is part of a film scene from one of the propaganda musicals appreciated by Stalin. Hermitage also refers to culture but does so in an ex negativo way: the emptied museum without the exhibits brought to safety symbolises not only the freedoms lost in a dictatorship but also the naked institution that is both the filter and the intermediary and as such never neutral. Despair shows the sinister fusion of religious and political power for self-preservation. In Angelus Minus Zero, as is so often the case, Vanriet makes his own life part of the work. He borrows a grieving peasant couple lost for words from Millet’s masterwork L‘Angélus and replaces them with his wife Simone and himself.

On the double edge of a vicariously experienced primal catastrophe - the history of his parents who as resistance fighters were imprisoned at Mauthausen, and his own life - Vanriet thus constantly balances the personal and the political, the individual and the general. But also historical artistic genres or styles between abstraction and representation, all of which his work uses – so that what could be seen as postmodernist multiplicity, thanks to celestial, almost Wagnerian, murmuring perceptible everywhere, is at the same time absorbed again, which amounts to an remarkable manoeuvre. With the concept of complete, aesthetic penetration, Vanriet finds himself in the remarkable double role of being equally a modernist and a critic of modernism. Jan Vanriet is essentially a storyteller, using painting and the history of painting to frame his literary activity.

Portraits occupy a special place in his oeuvre. Not only portraits of Vanriet himself as seen above, but also portraits of other people. This exhibition includes six examples from Losing Face, in which Vanriet produces images of just under sixty Jewish citizens who were transported from the Dossin barracks in Mechelen to Auschwitz. When Vanriet uses the official pictures from the prison files, he breathes new life into the people who were killed thanks to an inhuman ideology. Or in other words, Bertha, Israel Wolf, Doba, Hans and Sara, named by name, whose delicate contours painted with a certain idiom give back the dead as much presence and dignity as is possible from here. The remaining pictures of the exhibition also appear veiled to a certain extent, such as a large seascape named Rock. The sunset is not so much picturesque as ominous, highlighting the sun turning away, or, as Vanriet himself says: “Rock is an imaginary, ‘charged’ landscape in the sense of what the Dutch artist Armando called ‘guilty landscape’: a peaceful landscape, that hides something terrible. The sun over a rugged cliff is a furtive, averted sun – for me that’s a way of denying what is happening in the world beneath me.” And even the simple torch, painted from the front, that turns out to be a smouldering, blazing tribute to a scene of past atrocities, Vanriet found at the entrance to the Kehlsteinhaus (Eagle’s Nest) at Berchtesgaden, Adolf Hitler’s favourite place.

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All of this was a long time ago, but perhaps not as far back as we think. Since after the 1990s and the collapse of socialism, the monoculture of capitalism grew rampant across the world, in its slipstream in the end the desire for clearly identifiable enemy lines grew proportionally. Political polarisation is rife everywhere; right-wing populist and nationalist movements are on the rise not only in Europe, where recently war has broken out again for the first time in over 30 years. Perhaps these are also proxy conflicts, between those who from the 1960s on have stood for all-encompassing processes of emancipation, and in the meantime question the structure of a colonial world order characterised by white men’s imperialism, and those who prefer to look to the past for the sake of maintaining order in a society at global level. Vanriet’s artistic work possibly does both: it pursues and re-affirms the past, or in other words, delivers remembrance work in the sense of Aleida and Jan Assmann: each memory serving to construct the present, making things like identity understandable. Thanks to the constant references to what has been, the continuous reminder of history, as a painting and drawing narrator, Vanriet questions the conditio humana – and by weaving in his own life he indirectly assumes responsibility.

To reassert identity only through looking back, however, also delivers the matter which separates us from others. It even withdraws the urgently needed common ground. However occasionally Vanriets work also looks forward: namely when it goes even further back in time. Moments of bridge building can be found in Griffin, a small painting of the marriage of the Empress Theophanu to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II, a graphic document dating from 972 with delicately drawn mythical creatures in red circles. But also in Slab, a canvas on which Vanriet paints a gravestone from the Byzantine Museum, an object that once had an interim use: in the 17th century, a 12th-century Byzantine stone slab was converted into a gravestone. Here, Christian Orthodox Europe merges with Jewish Europe, and such a constructive and connecting moment of bridge building creates resonance, between the artist and the museum, between cultures, religions, beliefs of any kind.

Now a world that feels chaotic and contradictory threatens to disintegrate once again, whilst each of us should be aware that the modernity fed by Promethean promises, dedicated to constant growth, can no longer be designated the Europe of tomorrow. Moving backwards into the future, just like the angel of history, as Walter Benjamin once wrote about Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, Vanriet works to permanently making the past available. Museums tend to do the same, wanting to display history and temporality, but their claim that they are universal can also be understood as part of human arrogance. Perhaps the real protagonist of this exhibition is therefore a celestial body: not only in the face of climatic catastrophe is it impossible for anyone to remain unaffected by the sun, which is shining on the face of the camp guard. “The extinction of species, the environmental disaster and other wars are based on the project of cutting and separating, which leaves an ocean of dump”, as Michel Serres writes in his latest essay. However, by interpreting the setting sun in Vanriet’s painting Rock as the dawn, as an awakening to create connections, it could be seen as an appropriate occasion to protect the world we all inhabit – regardless of whether that is in Thessaloniki, at the outer borders of the European Union in the North of Africa or on the Mediterranean sea, or in a European city such as Antwerp.

Martin Germann is an author and exhibition maker who lives in Cologne. In October 2021 he was appointed adjunct curator for Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. From 2012 to 2019 he led the artistic department of S.M.A.K Ghent as senior curator, between 2008 and 2012 he was a curator at the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover. After studying Sociology, Cultural Sciences and Arts Management and Cultural Work in Berlin and Potsdam, he worked for the 3rd and 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2003-2006).