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‎Jan Vanriet, the music boy‎

‎Brussel, Roberto Polo Gallery, 2016 Hardback, 168 pages, 29.5 x 24 cm, EN. ISBN 9781907363108.‎

‎The Music Boy exhibition at the New Art Gallery Walsall is the artist's first in the United Kingdom. A 168-page hardback, illustrated catalogue featuring extensive essays by Andrew Graham-Dixon and Martin Herbert, as well as a foreword by Charlotte Mullins was published on the occasion. The exhibition is titled after a quadriptych of paintings depicting the artist's grandmother and his uncle playing an accordion.Jan Vanriet's work mainly concerns the memory of history and the construction of pictorial surface. As Martin Herbert writes: "Vanriet builds up his paintings in layers, and the strata of underpainting have, in his case, a polyvalent quality. In some cases they form glazes that gift the paintings with an internal glow; in others, the half-visible ghosts of earlier paintings both reaffirm the idea that something is being held back, and situate Vanriet's paintings as a carefully wrought, crafted statement that has gone through stages in order to reach a conclusive point, like a phrase honed through multiple careful edits." Jan Vanriet's mother, father and uncle participated in the Resistance movement and were deported by the Nazis. His parents met in the Mauthausen concentration camp and their stories and memories of the Second World War and its aftermath continue to permeate his paintings. Themes of love, loss, identity, destiny and disappearance pervade his work. And yet Vanriet says: "The starting point may be my family, but I see it as a universal story. I don't want the themes to be too narrow, too close to me, because they should go wider than that. If not, it is only anecdote and I have not painted well enough."‎