Belgian artist Michael Borremans has created a renowned body of work, acclaimed both for its mastery of the mediums of drawing and painting—and for the surreal and unsettling world he uses them to evoke.

All of Borremans’ work shares a sense of ambiguity and melancholy, with elements of the bizarre creeping into what at first seems like a technically startling, yet straightforward realism. Through imagery harkening back to an undatable past—though there are hints of the 1940s—Borremans creates an austere and oppressive world where things become more and more disturbing the deeper you look.

His second solo show at New York’s David Zwirner gallery shows Borremans working with a more contemporary mise-en-scene. In these new paintings, drawn from photographs the artist composed himself, Borremans turns to larger-scale formats as well as to exploring the genre of portraiture. In doing so, he also turns to the history of painting, through references to the style of masters like Goya, Velazquez and Chardin.

I’ve always been struck by the tension in your work between your technical virtuosity and the realism in the paintings, and this unsettling, surreal world they suggest…

All of that creates a kind of psychological impact that is interesting. It’s kind of conceptual in a way. We all deal with images as a language, we all respond to these codes, but I fuck these codes up—that what’s I do. Following the elements in a work usually leads to something, leads to a solution. In my work, it fails to do that. You have within the imagery a kind of “ideological failure” is how I put it. I look out for that, I mess around with it, because I think it makes you question not only an art work, but also an image, and with that reality and truth. You know: Does truth exist? What is it?

Is that why you’re drawn to this uncanny world filled with an ambiguous past? You’ve frequently used some dark imagery out of the 1940’s…

In these new paintings, I’ve tried to avoid it. But there are several reasons why I’ve used that type of imagery. For one, I didn’t want there to be an individual in the paintings. In my paintings, there are no individuals, they’re just types, stereotypes, two-dimensional images. They’re human beings in their symbolic quality, like the pieces in a chess game—they stand for something. I also wanted to avoid showing contemporary people because I think that has an anecdotal connotation, which wasn’t useful for me because I wanted to depict this very general, 20th-century man.

So I took the image of man in the middle of the 20th century. That’s an interesting period, of course, because you had the War then, and there was this time from the 1930s to the 1960s with tremendous change in society and in life. Therefore, it’s fairly significant, especially in the way we look back it, which is why I wanted to use that imagery.

It was also to erase time a bit, to make it general. But I found out that the imagery also has an aesthetic quality and that perhaps that quality was too dominant sometimes, and the work was appreciated mostly for that. That disturbed me, which is why I’m seeking a more efficient way to work out my concepts.

In changing to a more contemporary imagery, you’ve also harkened back to Velazquez and Manet and even Chardin—in doing these new portraits for example.

That’s a form of dialogue with tradition in painting. But of course the portraits are not real portraits. They’re not about people that are depicted, or making a characteristic image of them that speaks for what they are. I just use this exterior form of a portrait so that you have certain expectations of it, but it doesn’t really work like a portrait. It doesn’t reveal anything or go where we’d expect it would go. So on the surface you have a portrait, but the content of it is just not there. There’s nothing there.

There’s this amazing quality to the paint…

Yes, but that’s another aspect of the work. I think an interesting work of art—whatever it is, whether it’s film or literature—should have a whole range of qualities, and therefore you can appreciate it for very different reasons and from very different angles. Good art needs that. In a lot of 20th-century art, you have this focus on only certain aspects of art, and it was a very interesting period for that. But that’s finished now. That’s why I think I’m a very subversive and revolutionary artist [laughs]. An artist has to be convinced of that: It’s not pretentious, it’s not arrogance, it’s a responsibility.

You know, art is always a testimony, is always witnessing its time. When you look in the past, it’s always the art that tells the story, really. It’s the thing that remains, and we should not underestimate it.

Is a sense of being culturally haunted by the Second World War part of the imagery in your painting?

Well as you know, and it’s a cliché of course, that every work of an artist is a kind of self-portrait. And of course this period has an influence on me, because when I was little in the 1960s and 1970s, older people only talked about the war. It was really present still. It wasn’t that long ago. All my aunts and my grandfather and grandmother had all these stories about the war. As a child, that was a tremendous influence.

This dialogue with tradition in painting you mentioned—is this continuity of tradition part of what you find productive in painting?

I started painting kind of late. I was in my early 30s. I did drawing before and did work in graphic media. I always wanted to paint but I never dared to do it. I never found my way in it. I tried from time to time. But I’ve always been interested in the medium. Now, the more I paint, I can’t stop anymore.

One of the reasons I consciously chose to work in painting is that you can’t use it only as a medium. It has this historical connotation, and either you want [that connotation] or you don’t want it. So if you paint, you should make use of that. It’s inherent to the medium, and it’s very important. If you don’t want it, take another medium. It’s as simple as that. Therefore this dialogue with other painting is to me very essential.

It also has to do with another aspect of the medium of painting: Good painting is always contemporary in a way. I just came from MoMA, from the Munch show—he’s not my favorite painter—but his paintings are concretely there. They’re mental things, they’re not objects. They have this mental vibration, and they are here now. A painting is always now. When I see a self-portrait by Rembrandt, and it’s well conserved, it looks like it was painted yesterday. There’s this leveling of time, this erasing of time.

You mentioned starting in drawing, which is also a major facet of your work. Do you see drawing and painting as distinct projects?

There are similarities, thematically, between my drawing and my painting, but they are different things, because they have a different function for me. The drawings are more literal, the putting on paper of ideas really. Painting is a more passionate thing. There’s much more risk in it. There’s me and there’s the painting, and we have to come together in a way. Drawing is my medium, I control it much better. The painting I don’t control that much. It’s like a mistress.

But your paintings are so assured, the technique is so assured…

That’s how it’s got to look [laughs]. I always think I can do better. That’s why sometimes I have to postpone a show—I postponed this show three times. Sometimes, mentally, I’m just not finished with a group of works, and I often make the same painting several times, just to see if I can do it better.

There’s an example of that in the new show, with these two paintings of a man’s legs…

Yes, but in that case they were both interesting. That’s why I made a diptych out of it, because it gives something more to the whole. It was an interesting accident.

Let’s go back to the drawings. You tend to work on very intimate material—envelopes, passepartoutsmaterials that aren’t necessarily traditional drawing mediums.

What has always fascinated me about drawing since I was a child is that you can, on an envelope or whatever, evoke a complete world. You are god. That has always been completely striking for me. I can do anything, and I don’t harm anyone.

But your drawings and paintings are often about seemingly harmful experiences, or about being controlled.

Yes, but what’s wrong with that? It’s all around us. In fact, it’s less there in my work than in the real world. That’s part the romantic element to the imagery, too, in the sense that’s there’s no way out, that we’re all prisoners—I mistrust institutions. It’s like Caspar David Friedrich. He used nature as a metaphor; I work in the interior.

You also work from photographs; what do you think has been so productive to a whole generation of painters about translating a photographic image into the medium of painting?

Well, you have to be able to deal with it. A lot of painters stay too close to the photograph, and it’s clear when you see the work. You have to leave the photograph, to manipulate it a bit. And the photograph doesn’t have to be interesting; it’s the painting that has to be interesting. I never use a good photograph because that’s finished. When you have good photograph you cannot improve it anymore. So I always work from an image that has a lot of shortcomings. Then I have a feeling that I am creative, that I am changing the original image.

And since photography has been there it has been an aid for artists, a device for painters. You don’t have to have a model standing all day in your studio, although that gives a different kind of painting. I paint from nature as well from time to time. It’s important to do that. When I paint in small formats, I often do it from nature.

You mostly work in small scale—except for this huge painting in the new show. Is that influenced by your training as an etcher?

It’s practical—such a big painting like The Avoider is not practical. I’m a pragmatic person. Painters mostly are, because it’s a medium for pragmatists. You don’t need much—with drawing even more so. Sometimes an artist has to rebuild a whole museum, and I can get the same impact on a small page.

I’ve also been experimenting with film, small 35mm loops. Film is not a pragmatic medium, but it’s actually very close to what I’m doing in painting. The relationship between painting and film is much closer than painting and photography. Painting to me is a moving image when it’s painted well. To me there’s a connection, and experimenting with film is a very obvious thing to do—it comes out of the painting.