In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes of his frustration at trying to remember his mother while studying a photograph of her. When looking at her features, he realises that despite the familiar organisation of her eyes, nose, mouth, hands, the essence of his mother still alludes him. “I never recognised her except in fragments,” he laments, “which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether.”

A similar struggle to reactivate fragments of the past in the present, to rekindle the emotive potency of the historic ‘now’, informs the paintings of Jan Vanriet. In Losing Face (2009-2013), a series based on deportees from Dossin barracks, the Nazi transit camp in Mechelen, Belgium, for example, Vanriet painted portraits of the nameless Belgians who were terminated in their thousands. And yet elements of their faces, their bodies, refuse to coalesce, and all we are left with are the fragments Barthes talked of, the semblance of a figure without the essence of a particular individual. Something remains ungraspable and out of view.

Vanriet often paints in series, each body of work stemming from a particular image or memory. A dog-eared photograph of his parents awkwardly embracing led to the paintings of The Contract (2013); another photograph, of his grandmother and uncle, is the root of the quadriptych The Music Boy (2013). He draws the past into the present through his reinterpretation of such photographs, yet he also interrogates their frozen content, returning to the same source image again and again. By changing the background, the tonal palette, the scope of focus in each painting, he alters our reading of the narrative, amplifying its emotive charge. Simultaneously he explores the expressive malleability of paint – how paint itself interprets a narrative, changing its emphasis, or how it becomes the narrative itself.

On a recent visit to Vanriet’s studio in Antwerp, I took the train from Brussels, passing through several towns along the way: Vilvoorde, Mechelen, Mortsel. Each town’s windswept station was barely visible through the train’s windows; the rain – driven in rivulets across the glass – looked like streaming tears. In Mechelen, I watched elegantly painted townhouses recede from view and I thought of Losing Face and the Belgians who found themselves incarcerated in Mechelen’s Fort Breendonk by the Nazis. Their loss of life in World War II, and the Nazis’ extensive extermination programmes, left a palpable scar across Europe. This dark and painful collective past is evoked in Vanriet’s work, which aches with a sense of loss, of historic melancholy. You feel that his whole life has been shaped by this war, from the loss of his uncle through tuberculosis brought on by war conditions to the meeting of his parents in a concentration camp in Mauthausen, Austria. The past is constantly re-examined, re-interpreted in the present, gleaned from snatches of memory and fragmented photographic moments, history rewritten again and again, time conflated with each brushstroke, past and present bound together.

In recent years, Vanriet has been drawn to paint himself and his wife, the writer Simone Lenaerts. They appear locked together in The Horse (2015); she contemplates the weight of (art) history in Visitor (2013). In Memory (2015), Vanriet paints himself wearing an oversized faux-fur hat. His face is taut, serious, beneath it, his sad eyes framed by violet shadows. The hat belonged to his grandmother – the woman who appears in The Music Boy – and you feel the weight of family history and responsibility painted into each strand of its dark fur, into the yellow flecks of light. It binds Vanriet to his family’s past, to Europe’s past, to the stories he has lived with since childhood. But it also connects him to his painterly ancestors, to the self-portraiture of Rembrandt and Van Eyck, to the perspective of an artist who looks out from within, from inside the visible surface, and contemplates the outer skin and the trappings we hide beneath.

Despite the breathtaking bravura of turquoise and red in Women in a Forest (2015), where Vanriet has pushed figuration to a point of painterly abstraction – also seen in his light-addled Opera series (2014), and the blue lament of the Berlin paintings (City Lights, 2014) – it is the historic source at the heart of the painting that loads the dice yet again. This new painting appears as a form of coda to his latest series of reflections on Cézanne’s bathers, Bathers (2015), in which he explores the history of modern figuration and what it is to be a painter today. However, as Belgian police hunt new killers in Europe’s heartland, the naked women running through the trees in Women in a Forest appear as modern-day Daphnes taking refuge, painterly echoes of the women slaughtered by the Nazis after being forced to strip naked in Rzeszow forest, Poland.

From Bracelet (2014) to Memory, The Contract to Women in a Forest, the burden of history haunts Vanriet’s own dreams and memories. His series of paintings could be seen as expressions of Barthes’ perceived failings of both memory and photography. Barthes’ observed: “I dream about her [his mother], I do not dream her.” Vanriet’s paintings are poetic fugues that respond to a similar yearning to solidify the essence, the ‘being’ of the past, to give it a voice in the present.