Jan Vanriet

Closed Doors is an important series of recent paintings by Jan Vanriet (1948), who represented Belgium in the 1979 Bienal de Sao Paolo, 1984 Biennale di Venezia and 1990 International Art Festival of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Seoul. The Jury of the latter awarded its Special Prize to Jan Vanriet, along with John Chamberlain and Mimmo Rotella. In 2010, the international press acclaimed Jan Vanriet's retrospective exhibition Closing Time at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium in Antwerp, which was visited by over 88 000 people.
Through a restrained 'narrative' painting, Jan Vanriet explores the essential and universal by reducing forms to signs and symbols, using meaningful colours, carefully constructed lyrical surfaces and scumbling paint, almost as if he were inventing a mysterious calligraphy with his fragile brushstrokes. His style, or as the French art historian and theorist Michel Laclotte wrote, maniera, is above all a path which he has taken to express the themes that have obsessed him since the beginning: man and nature oppressed by a ceaselessly unfolding history.