Jan Vanriet
(Antwerp,
1948 )
Jan Vanriet is a painter, but he also nourishes the attraction that literature exerts on him. He regularly publishes poetry and essays and collaborates with befriended authors. At the age of seventy, he published Radeloos geluk (Distraught happiness), a prose account of a multifaceted life as an artist. He also lards his visual work with literary motifs. Vanriet often paints in series – portraits, landscapes or fragments from everyday reality – opening himself up to the new interpretations and formal options the painting process provokes. He is an observer who explores what affects and shapes him, then quietly crystallises it with paint. His images and themes reveal a strong political consciousness, defined by the stories of his communist parents who met in a concentration camp. Vanriet has an aversion to any form of ideological violence, deception and abuse of power. He is also concerned with the paradoxical: the aesthetic possibilities of a brutal reality counterpointed with the power of human vulnerability. Vanriet represented Belgium at the Venice Biennale in 1984. In 2010, he curated Closing Time, the last exhibition at the Antwerp Museum of Fine Arts before its renovation, with works from the collection and a survey of his own oeuvre.
