Jan Vanriet and the Beauty of Evil Painting is War

The recent work of the Antwerp painter Jan Vanriet is embedded in the violent history of the twentieth century. He has always been politically and artistically committed. But for a long time he kept his commitment out of his visual work. In 1986, when he was 38, his work changed. He seemed to have “acquired enough history”. He started to make collages, used icons, patterns and stencils, experimented with Korean Hanji-paper, watercolour, put in references to old masters and contemporary artists and explored the boundaries between the figurative and the abstract.