A hand has been held up for our contemplation. Little else is visible, apart from a field of mottled, nondescript greyish colour on which there is a small horizontal scratch or groove, as well as the hand’s faint shadow. So what have we here? The hand of an unseen body, with behind it some piece of wall or some patch of indeterminate ground seen in a flat, dull light. It is shown palm outwards, and at the centre of the palm there is an uneven wound: still fresh, a blood-red channel, worm-like, cut into the flesh. Were it not for that small slug of vermilion, the image might look almost police-procedural: the fragment of a diagram drawn round the body of a murder victim at the scene of a crime. As it is, the picture is so simplified that we experience it more as pictogram than painting. It is a piece of evidence, a phenomenon in need of witnessing. It is proof that something has happened. But what? No more information is forthcoming, other than the artist’s title, and it is a laconic title at that: Wounded Hand.

Jan Vanriet is a painter who has a habit of withholding information. Hence his fondness for isolated or disconnected figures, for fragmentary details, floated in areas of variously inflected emptiness; hence his tendency to paint pictures that look as though they might have a story to tell, while never fully disclosing it. His work can be as clearly drawn, and almost as schematic, as the hieroglyphs of the ancient Egyptians: a language made of pictures. It can also be as hard to read as hieroglyphs once were, before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Wounded Hand is only a small fragment of the painter’s code, but a suggestive one.

The image of the bleeding hand has its own history, which is part of the history of miracles. The suppurating wound was once a symbol of fellow-feeling, of an empathy with the suffering of others so strong that it could only be expressed in the spontaneous outpouring, not just of grief, but of actual blood. According to the legend of St. Francis, one day the saint went up to a mountain to pray. While he was meditating on Christ’s trials on the cross, picturing them in his mind’s eye, he experienced a vision so intense that the wounds of the Crucifixion were repeated on his own body: bleeding nail-holes appeared in his hands and feet, and a spear-piercing in his side. These wounds became known as the stigmata. For Francis and his followers, they were both a sign of redemption and a perpetual enjoinder to memory. To remember the sufferings of Christ was also to remember that Christ’s living image – in the form of every poor, suffering person – is everywhere around us. Feel like Christ, suffer like Christ, work to save others as Christ had done. In recognition of Francis’ teachings, his followers called him Alter Christus: another Christ.

Pay respect to those who have suffered. Remember their wounds. In that act of remembering, make their wounds bleed afresh. Jan Vanriet has tried to do such things in much of his work, certainly that part of his work – and it is no small part – which has to do with the grim history lived through by his parents, and by his parents’ generation. He has painted memorials or homages to the dead of the concentration camps. He has reworked old family photographs, pictures of his mother, say, or his uncle, from the time when they joined the Belgian Resistance against the Nazis. So the wounded hand, the hand stigmatised by such intensity of retrospective pain and outrage that it bleeds, might conceivably be the hand of the artist. But it is also (sinister touch) a left hand: the hand that damns, rather than the hand that blesses, when the Day of Judgement comes.

*

Moonrise (diptych) is a self-portrait in modern dress, infused with an air of melancholy. In one of the two canvases, which make up the picture, the artist stands before us, wearing a baggy jacket, check shirt and dark blue trousers, staring into the middle distance with an expression that suggests he has gone somewhere else in his mind. The other canvas reveals the reflection of a tree in water at night. Through the branches of the tree appears the moon, partly occluded; faint gleams of quicksilver play in the black-green surface of the water. Put the images together and they suggest the romantic image of the wanderer, a traveller through the world’s bleak wilderness.

Is he setting off, or has he just returned? He is barefoot but for socks; and in each of his hands, he holds one of his shoes. It is as if he is about to undress; and it is as if that simple everyday act has put him in mind of something else. Maybe he is thinking of St. Francis, who gave away his clothes and walked into the world in beggar’s rags. Maybe he is thinking of other people, at another time, being told to undress and leave their shoes behind, because they will not be needing them for the rest of their journey. The expression in his eyes suggests a mixture of distraction and pity.

The Visitor is a smaller, more freely painted picture: more oil sketch than painting. A woman – the artist’s wife, Simone, a novelist whose themes have an affinity with his own – stands with her back to a wall and looks away to one side. Her shoulders are slightly hunched, her hands clasped in front of her. There is a mixture of tension and vigilance in her body language, but a look of compassion on her face. Who is she visiting? Could it be the artist? Or her own memories? She has the air of an accomplice: a partner in the act of remembering.

Jan Vanriet deals in implication and suggestion: half-hidden meanings that lurk beneath the surface. His art revolves around memory, but one that is full of gaps and slippages: necessarily so, since many of those whom the artist wishes to remember are people he never knew. One series of paintings, Losing Face, was inspired by some of the 20,000 individuals who were sent from Belgium to German concentration camps during the Second World War, never to return. Working from old black-and-white photographs preserved in police records of the time, Vanriet set out to paint a fixed number of portraits of the almost numberless dead. He felt that too many Belgians had, for too long, turned a blind eye to this painful, shameful phase of their own nation’s history.

Some faces spoke to him more than others, and those were the ones he chose to memorialise. The resulting images are rooted in paradox. Each is a depiction of a living, breathing, human presence; yet collectively they mark a great loss of life. The dichotomy is expressed by a disjunction of style. The faces have the look of spectres half-grasped from the abyss of an unrecoverable past. But they are enlivened by touches of wilful vividness, momentary flashes of vibrancy: signs of life retrospectively imagined for them, projected on to them, by the artist. Consider the sudden intensity of Bertha’s gaze and the black shock of her hair, silhouetted against a background of shocking orange. Consider Israel, with his high cheekbones and sad intellectual eyes: pale as a ghost, but a ghost who has been impulsively endowed with electric shock-waves of red hair, like a seismograph, registering all of the thoughts, all of the sensations, that he might have experienced, but never did.

*

Born in Antwerp in 1948, Jan Vanriet grew up in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Its shadow falls across much of his work, as it did across his childhood. His own family’s experiences and memories of war lie behind a quadriptych of paintings entitled The Music Boy. Their starting point is an old black-and-white photograph from the family album, taken in 1937 or 1938, a year or two before the outbreak of war: a moment of peace before the storm. The photograph shows Vanriet’s maternal grandmother and his uncle, still a teenager at the time, relaxing somewhere out of town. She sits on a bench, while he half-stands beside her playing his accordion. The painter’s family on his mother’s side were barge-haulers, who transported wood, food and other necessities along the ancient canal systems of the Low Countries. They lived, as well as worked, on their boat, so often took their time off in the countryside, making their own music for entertainment.

The painter’s different versions of the subject amount to variations played on a single theme. In The Music Boy (Black), the two figures appear stranded in a wasteland the colour of asphalt, while clouds shaped like amoebae wriggle in a turquoise sky. In The Music Boy (Green), the figures have been transplanted to an expanse of pale yellow that might be a beach, while the heavens have gone green and the clouds have taken on the colour of flesh. In The Music Boy (Orange), the wasteland or beach has metamorphosed once more, this time into a green field below a sky of livid orange. The woman wears an apron over a plain work dress, while her son is clothed in what might either be shorts, or a pair of lederhosen (it is hard to be sure which, because his upper body is obscured by the unwieldy musical instrument held in his embrace). In none of the paintings do the faces of the figures come sharply into focus. They remain blurred, double-distanced from the moment they once inhabited. It is as if the already faded photograph has receded yet further into the distant past as a result of the attention the painter has paid to it. His work does not bridge the gap between what once was, and what can now be made of it, but opens it up: the past has not been made present, but turned into a phantasmagoria.

Memories touched by trauma are often fractured, disjunct, hard to distinguish from dreams or nightmares. They can also become confused with the sense impressions of the present, making the real world feel as though haunted by unquiet ghosts that cannot be laid to rest. The Music Boy (Grey) is the sketchiest of all these paintings, almost like a pencil drawing executed with the brush. In another sense, it is the most actual of them all, because it is the most rooted in the world of the present-day. Behind the figures, against the skyline, are the faint silhouettes of tall, slim, chimneys, distantly breathing smoke into the sky. They evoke the oil refineries of modern Belgium: structures of steel laced by electric light, issuing fire and smoke, that are visible to anyone on the fringes of Antwerp looking towards the sea. So this is a painting of two things: a scene of modern industry, juxtaposed with the trace of a memory of a barge-hauler’s wife and her son taking a moment of rest. Might this be the painter’s way of implying that, for him, the world of then and the world of now can never be entirely disentangled?

These pictures are also haunted by ghosts of the art of the past. They conjure up memories of much older images, those in particular inspired by the idea of Arcadia: an idyllically peaceful place to which men and women retreat, forsaking the city for the countryside, to retune the strings of their troubled souls. Giorgione, in Renaissance Venice, was the first post-classical artist to create visions of Arcadia, to be followed by many others: Watteau, in eighteenth-century France, painter of bittersweet fêtes champetrês; Matisse, at the start of the twentieth century, in the exultant masterpiece of his early maturity, La Joie de vivre. Vanriet’s The Music Boy might be placed within that same tradition, because so many elements of its imagery are plainly Arcadian: the rural setting; the isolated figures, at rest rather than work; the presence of a musician and the implied harmonies of the music being played. The air of morbidity and unease pervading the pictures strikes a dissonant note; but there is a tradition of such dissonance too within the historical canon of paintings of Arcadia. Around 1618 the Italian Baroque master Guercino painted two shepherds in a clearing, contemplating a human skull. His title for the picture? Et in Arcadia Ego: “I, Death, am even in Arcadia”.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, Vanriet’s grandmother and his uncle – among other members of his family – were arrested by the Gestapo as members of the Belgian Resistance. They were sentenced to forced labour and eventually sent to concentration camps. Both survived but Vanriet’s uncle, who had been an inmate at Dachau, was so racked by infirmity and riddled by disease that he died just three years after the war’s end. Vanriet was born in the year of his death.

His uncle’s accordion appears in a number of other paintings.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

The painter remembers going to the theatre one evening with his mother, when he was a little boy. Rudi Schuricke, German singer and matinee idol, was top of the bill. He sang his greatest hit, a lilting and melancholy number called Komm zurück, to the accompaniment of violins (and possibly an accordion: it can be heard in most extant recordings). The song’s refrain, with its rising emphasis on the second syllable of “zurück”, might be an incantation: “Come back, come back”.

Big Bracelet is a picture connected to the painter’s memories of that evening, of the song, of his mother. It is a representation of the heavy gold bracelet she wore, but painted on a monumental scale: the canvas is two metres tall and more than two and a half metres wide. It has the character of a vanitas, a genre of picture much favoured by Vanriet’s forebears in the Low Countries, in particular the Dutch painters of the Golden Age and their burgher clientele, whose pride in their new wealth was always attended by a Protestant sense of guilt: glittering depictions of this world’s plenty, shadowed by morbid reflections on the transience of all things.

The outsized bracelet might suggest the distortions of childhood memory: a place in the mind, like the looking-glass world of Alice, where real things reappear as much larger apparitions of themselves. The picture may also be understood as a cipher for memory itself, as the painter conceives it: something to be treasured, but also something of a fetish, even a trap. The circle of gold resembles a fortress or tower: a place of confinement. The palace of memory is also a prison. The play of light in the links of the bracelet – stars, fuzzy flares and a puzzling arrangement of rectangles that may or may not evoke the shapes of paintings hung on some wall of the artist’s studio – is alluring but also bewildering. Looking at these broken reflections is like getting lost in the fractured symmetries of a kaleidoscope.

The artist’s mother appears in person, together with his father, in a melancholy polyptych of eleven canvases entitled The Contract. As in the case of The Music Boy, Vanriet’s point of departure for the series was an old black-and-white photograph, this time one taken not before, but just after, the Second World War: a picture of the artist’s parents partnered on a dance-floor. The paintings elaborated from this fragment of family history feel like interrogations of the past: attempts to find the larger patterns shaping a relationship of many years, within a single image snatched from a moment close to its inception.

The painter’s parents had met at Mauthausen, a concentration camp in Austria. His father, who was a violinist in the camp orchestra, the Lager Kapelle, had been assigned to the kitchen, where one of his jobs had been to distribute bread to female prisoners. One day he heard some new arrivals speaking the dialect of his native Antwerp, and gave them extra bread. Among them was the woman destined to become his wife. They vowed to find one another, should they both survive the war. They did so, and married soon after.

The Contract presents a series of meditations on the fulfilment of that contract, for better or worse, but the effect of the whole is a form of mystification. The couple look close, but are they merely bound together by the rules of the dance? In several of the pictures their faces are blurred, which has the disconcerting effect of making their smiles look forced, artificial. In others they lose their faces altogether, turning into proxies of themselves, mysterious fragments cut from the fabric of the past, or stamped irrevocably by it. In others again the painter homes in on particular details, like a detective holding a magnifying glass over a photograph in search of evidence: her hand clinging, while his holds a cigarette; his foot awkwardly treading on hers.

In one picture alone, The Contract 4, he introduces a foreign element, one drawn from his own knowledge of their past. The merest outline of the couple’s feet is superimposed on to a symbol of that which brought them together in the first place: a red triangle, the badge that marked out political prisoners in the Nazi camps. Some things can be left behind, but never really escaped. The dance of the uneasy lovers is also a dance of death.

*

In 1955, Nikolaus Pevsner published a provocative essay on the nature of English painting, sculpture and architecture, entitled The Englishness of English Art. Fondness for satire and a boisterous love of irregularity were, for him, among the defining characteristics of the English visual imagination, although he did also acknowledge that his argument was to be taken with a pinch of salt. Every nation is a fiction of sorts, a more or less tidy construct masking the incorrigibly untidy and defiantly mongrel reality of people’s intermingling. In the mischievous words of Walter Sickert, “no one could be more English than I am: born in Munich in 1860, of pure Danish descent!”.

Might it be possible to talk about the Belgianness of Belgian art? After all, what is true of mongrel England seems even truer of Belgium. Until 200 years ago, this region of north-western Europe was not even nominally a country. From its inception, it was a creation of political convenience, an artificial state devised by the great powers of the day to act as a strategic buffer between France and Germany, and a means of keeping Holland in its place. Ever since, its inherent internal divisions have made Belgium’s cultural identity – part Flemish, part French, part Dutch, part Walloon, with increasing shades of influence from the Muslim world and elsewhere – almost impossible to define.

This divided history has its dirtier aspects. The Nazis once promised to establish an independent Flanders separate from Belgium, which partly explains the high number of collaborators among the country’s Flemish population. Their guilt is being marked, as the innocence of those who perished is remembered, in Vanriet’s portraits of the concentration camps’ Belgian victims. The painter recently created what might be seen as an impulsive late addition to that series in the form of a work tacitly acknowledging the role of Brussels as a home to fomenters of modern atrocity – those who have done their dirty work not in the name of Hitler, but of Islam. After the sordid massacre at the Bataclan nightclub in Paris in November 2015, Vanriet felt moved to sketch the face of one the victims, from a photograph posted on the Internet, for publication in one of Belgium’s principal newspapers, De Morgen. The drawing’s title is simply: Victime. The image is not explicitly linked to those that form the series Losing Face, although its moral connection to them is clear: another homage to an innocent, thoughtlessly slaughtered for a cause that is no true cause.

The historically confused nature of the Belgian sense of national identity is enshrined at the level of the languages people speak. Here the results are not so much toxic as comical. Brussels-Central is officially bilingual; the so-called Flemish region is, paradoxically, monolingual in Dutch; while Wallonia is a pure French-speaking territory, except in the small parts where they speak German.

So, perhaps, it is only logical that the most famous Belgian painting of modern times should be a joke on the slipperiness of language and the deceptiveness of appearances: Ceci n’est pas une pipe, by René Magritte. In one sense, Magritte was only pointing out the obvious: of course, it is not a pipe; it is a painting of a pipe. But maybe his work is a metaphor of sorts for Belgium, as well, which has been, and doubtless will continue to be, many things, but none as simple as a unified nation state.

Magritte was a painter of picture-puzzles, much haunted by the inheritance of older Flemish art, in particular the altarpieces of such Old Masters as the Van Eycks and Rogier van der Weyden. What are many of his own works but altarpieces that have been deconsecrated, pictures of miracle knowingly spoofed for an age of non-belief? Magritte’s wine is not the blood of Christ; instead, the bottle, which carries it, turns into a phallic carrot. When he paints a man looking in a magic mirror, what he sees is no revelation, merely the back of his own head. At the centre of Magritte’s bleak, nihilist’s universe is the apple, symbol of the fall. In his hands, it has become a trademark – a brand stamped on all of humanity, but most particularly on the business-suited figure of the Brussels petit-bourgeois. Redemption? Forget it. Especially if you’re Belgian.

There is something of Magritte about Jan Vanriet, and perhaps, something too of Herge, the inventor of Tintin, modern Belgium’s second most famous modern artist (like Herge, Vanriet has worked as an illustrator of kinds, creating drawings to accompany essays on political and ethical issues for a number of Belgian newspapers, and as an occasional designer of book covers and posters). To Herge’s clarity of outline, he joltingly conjoins Magritte’s sense of the Surreal, and a disaffected conception of the modern world as a fallen and tainted place. But still, there is room in his world for human sympathy and for optimism, however muted it may seem.

Horse is Vanriet’s title for an image of himself and his wife, their bodies awkwardly conjoined, as if playing the part of a pantomime horse, but without the costume. He plays the back end, she the front. In fact, there are several images of the couple horsing around in this way: this is another of the painter’s works in serial form. In each version, he shows himself stooped, bent at the waist, planting his head in the small of his back’s wife, while she stands stiffly upright. With his arms around her waist and her hands around his, dressed anomalously in their everyday clothes, they patiently wait, but for what?

The setting changes from one painting to the next, as does the scale: some of the pictures are very small, the smallest of them just a notebook sketch. But the two figures remain constant in their pose, obstinate in their absurdity. In the largest of the paintings, Horse (Frozen), the painter isolates the two figures on a vast sheet of ice, as if stranded in the middle of some Low Countries lake at midwinter, reminiscent of the winter scenes once painted by Brueghel. The title of another, Horse (Maestà), in which the figures, for once, are half-turned towards the viewer as they perform their mute and enigmatic pantomime, suggests that he sees some correspondence between these paintings and the gold-ground altarpieces of early Renaissance Italy, most famous among them, Duccio’s Maestà for the cathedral in Siena.

One thing these pictures wilfully borrow from holy art of the past is the symbolic power of repetition. To paint two figures in the same pose again and again, to present them in such a stiff and hieratic form, is to begin to turn them into something like a piece of iconography: an image that is always emblematic of the same thing, like St. Jerome with his stone, beating his breast in the wilderness, or St. Sebastian shot through with his arrows. What might the couple as pantomime horse signify, as a secular emblem? Does the painter see marriage as a kind of holy rite of self-sacrifice, a bloodless modern form of martyrdom? Or is it something more akin to a pantomime, even a pantomime performed on ice: a slippery comedy of loving, co-dependent compromise; a ritual at once serious and funny, whose participants are forced to bend over backwards (or even forwards) to accommodate one another’s peculiarities? One thing is certain. Horse is not a horse.

*

In 2008, the American novelist Philip Roth published Indignation, a book set in the 1950s, telling the story of a Jewish college student in his sophomore year. Its protagonist is a young man, nineteen years of age, called Marcus Messner. Written in the first person, the novel recounts Marcus’ struggles with his paranoid father and controlling mother, as well as his fraught sexual relationship with a young woman, a fellow student, who suffers from mental illness and suicidal urges. In other words, Indignation is a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age story: a tradition that can be traced back to the early novels of the European Enlightenment, such as Voltaire’s Candide and Goethe’s The Adventures of Wilhelm Meister, and forward to such classics of modern American literature as Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Yet Roth’s is a bildungsroman with a difference, in that its narrator is writing from beyond the grave, trapped in a mysterious limbo-like state, where memory has become his only reality:

“As a nonbeliever, I assumed that the afterlife was without a clock, a body, a brain, a soul, a god - without anything of shape, form, or substance, decomposition absolute. I did not know that it was not only not without remembering, but that remembering would be the everything...”

“Retelling my own story to myself round the clock in a clockless world, lurking disembodied in this memory grotto, I feel as though I’ve been at it for a million years. Is this really to go on and on - my nineteen little years forever while everything else is absent, my nineteen little years inescapably here, persistently present, while everything that went into making real the nineteen years, while everything that put one squarely in the midst of, remains a phantasm, far, far away?”

In 1938, seventy years before Roth wrote Indignation, the Russian painter Pyotr Petrovich Konchalovsky painted a portrait of Vsevolod Meyerhold, theatre director and impresario, which may now be seen in The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Meyerhold is shown reclining in a kind of orientalist boudoir, smoking a pipe in the company of his dog, a terrier, with a book and a box of tobacco on a table by his side. His pose might suggest relaxation, but his pouched and sleepless eyes are full of a dark, restless energy – an energy that seems to emanate outward from the figure of Meyerhold himself and express itself in the writhingly disturbed patterns of the Afghan carpet, which fills the wall behind him. Konchalovsky, a painter familiar with the orientalist fantasies of Matisse, uses pattern – as Matisse had done – both to flatten the space of his composition, forcing all the elements of his composition into a single plane, and to suggest the mental agitation of his sitter. The portrait was painted at the height of Soviet repression of the Russian avant-garde intelligentsia, and subsequent events would add to its extreme sensitivity a morbid element of prophecy: within a matter of months Meyerhold would be arrested; two years later, he would be dead.

Refuge, by Jan Vanriet, is a homage of sorts to Konchalovsky’s portrait. A man lies on his back, on cushions, in front of a wall hung with a carpet similar in pattern to that found in the portrait of Meyerhold in The State Tretyakov Gallery. But the dog has gone, along with the table and other accessories, while the interior has vanished – or rather melted away, it would seem, into a buzzing, phantasmal lake of colour, yellowy green washed with blue reflections. The man in this painting-after-another-painting does not lie on his side to meet the viewer’s gaze. Instead, he reclines on his back, eyes closed. The figure’s face suggests a self-portrait: an image of Jan Vanriet. It is as if the painter, set afloat in this dream-space, might indeed be dreaming himself back into Meyerhold’s own troubled position all those years ago, back in the late 1930s: the same period, it so happens, when many of his own family’s troubles began.

Might this picture be Vanriet’s way of painting his own kind of bildungsroman? He first became fascinated by the Russian avant-garde when he was a young man. Painting himself in place of Meyerhold, he is remembering his own former self, revolutionary enthusiasms and all. But there was another dimension to his and his family’s involvement with the Russia of Stalin, one that adds another layer to the onion of memory here being peeled. Many of the Nazis’ concentration camps were liberated by the Red Army, as a result of which both his father and his mother developed a certain admiration for the presumed achievements of the Communist regime. At a certain period, their involvement with Communism was so close that they could even have been considered as fellow travellers. So to paint a victim of Stalinism is to lay their misplaced enthusiasms of long ago to rest. It is the painter’s way of bidding a family farewell to ‘Uncle Joe’ and all his grim tyranny.

There is another version of Refuge, another reinterpretation of Meyerhold by Konchalovsky, in which Philip Roth’s novel, Indignation, has been included. In this picture – Indignation is, in fact, its title – the artist once more occupies a dissolved and attenuated reminiscence of Meyerhold's orientalist boudoir, with its extravagantly patterned carpet; but this time, he is seated and holds a copy of Roth’s novel in his hands. He looks nervous, agitated, even a little shifty, as if looking at us, out of the corner of his eye, while only half-reading his book.

That book’s subject – or at least, its central idea of being caught up, as Roth expresses it, in “this memory grotto” - may provide a fruitful way of thinking about these paintings. Memory, together with its truancies is, after all, the central theme of Vanriet’s work – that, and fellow-feeling for those who have suffered at the hands of extreme prejudice.

It may be significant, in this context, that Vanriet too has suffered from a form of censorship or suppression in his own lifetime, paying for it not – as Meyerhold did – with his life, but certainly suffering a long period of near obscurity. From the mid-1980s and into the 1990s, Belgium – much like France – fell into the grip of a peculiarly oppressive form of soi-disant avant-gardism. During this time, the supposedly liberating values of a brave new era, proclaimed as triumphantly Postmodern, were adopted with such doctrinaire enthusiasm by those in charge of the nation’s visual art institutions that no one engaged in an activity as apparently retrograde as figurative painting was given any public encouragement at all. Many artists found their careers ruined; while those who survived these wilderness years, like Vanriet, had to endure years of neglect. Perhaps, there is a form of thanksgiving embedded in these two pictures, which form not a diptych but certainly a pair. The act of remembering depends on the fact of survival; only the living can pay homage to the dead.

*

Might this be Arcadia at last? We see figures in a landscape: nude, at rest, perhaps at play. We see them at nightfall and at midday, in worlds of grey and royal blue, against a white sky full of black raindrops and another sky patterned by stripes. They are the artist’s Bathers, and like so many of his creations, they too are memories, if not memories of memories, such is the hall of mirrors that seems to have produced them.

Many other artists have painted bathers. Rembrandt painted Susanna bathing, unaware of the lecherous gaze of old men. Cézanne painted bathers, and so too did Matisse: figures idealised to the point of abstraction, inhabiting remote visions of reality, embodying some fierce desire for purity of heart and spirit.

The ghosts of all those other, earlier depictions of bathers, manifestly haunt these paintings of nude figures that come so long after them. Like their forebears, these bathers do nothing much in particular, in many different settings. But theirs is no perfect world. While some of them stretch or lounge, there is one who always seems to have his head in his hands, as if lost in some private form of anguish: Et in Arcadia Ego. If this is an Arcadia, it is certainly a troubled one. Much of the time it looks like a wasteland, and a characteristically Belgian one, at that. The landscape inhabited by these bathers is unremittingly flat. Sometimes the eye can make out the shapes of structures, much like those of the oil refineries outside Antwerp.

Then there is Bather (Robe), one of the smallest and least assuming pictures in the series, but also among the most poignant: the image of a man with his shirt half pulled over his head, isolated against a dark, scumbled background. He is another ghost, but from a time long before that of Cézanne and Matisse – even before that of Rembrandt. We find his original – the figure is reversed, but ghosts have a habit of shifting their shape thus – in the background of an altarpiece by Piero della Francesca, painted in Italy in the middle years of the fifteenth century and now in The National Gallery, London: The Baptism of Christ.

The man, in that beautiful painting from another time, is taking off his shirt so that he may become one of the blessed, a follower of the Lord: alter Christus, as the Franciscans would have it. There is no way of telling why the man in Jan Vanriet’s painting is taking off his shirt: no sacred context, no John the Baptist, no standing Christ, stemming the flow of time with his feet like columns of white marble. But perhaps there is a dream lurking within his painting, too, however veiled by anxiety and disenchantment and the accumulation of painful memories. A dream that might, indeed, link bathing to baptism: that of being reborn to find, or make, a better world.