The latest critique is that I take a moralizing stance towards images that have to do with power. I admit power is something that fascinates me—not to have power but to look at the apparatus behind it, how images could exert power, how they could have a certain impact—but that’s not moralizing, rather it’s an attempt to underscore a of meanings. It’s never an accusatory, pointed finger.

The main, enduring criticism of my work is that I have by now already said too much about it. What started as an openness and willingness to accommodate a need for more information has been turned into a type of pedantic egocentrism on my part. That is the type of retrograde critique that springs from the inability of some to grant any importance to the work itself, which is of course an opinion they’re more than entitled to. What is not their right, however, is to narrow all of that into a very personal critique that has nothing to do with my work anymore.

It’s fair to demand a certain level of abstraction, which appears to be very difficult when everything else is becoming increasingly literal; that much is clear. But then that’s my personal fight in a world that is ever more antiseptic, and in which images only refer to other images, and the media to the media, and in which my pictures end up in this terrifying cycle.

Disregarding a type of criticism that refers everything back to you personally, it seems that some of your paintings nonetheless contain a very poignant moral critique. I’m thinking of Mwana Kitoko (Beautiful White Man) and the way it was installed with your other works [in an exhibition of the same title] in the Belgian pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale.

“Mwana Kitoko” was not an exhibition that intended to point fingers. Because of a confluence of coincidences, it happened to be shown in the year of the Lumumba commission [appointed to investigate the direct involvement of the Belgian government in the murder in 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected prime minister of Congo]. About a month after the Biennale closed, at a concluding ceremony which I was invited to attend, the commission announced that the Belgian government should issue an official apology, which they duly did. The Royal House did not.

For me the whole experience was a very elementary situation of touching on something, bringing it to people’s attention, and visualizing it in a different way. That has of course already been done in documentaries; there’s enough factual material dealing with this incident, but there were hardly any paintings about it. By transforming it through a painting into an anachronism, the subject became aestheticized in a way that drew criticism, from the French especially, that certain political content should not be directly expressed in paintings, which I thought was strange coming from a country that produced the likes of Manet and his Execution of Maximilian [1867–68]. So for the first time this pavilion for a country that’s normally seen as puny and insignificant was able to generate political content. I still feel it’s not possible to simply load any work of art with a particular political meaning; this was an important moment in which something was achieved through my work, but also because of events going on around it. I could just as well have presented a nice anthology of 20 years of painting or something like that, but on this occasion, location, context, and work fitted well through their mutual feedback.

I was interested in the way you used the idea of the documentary in your reinterpretation of history painting in that show. If I’m not mistaken, certain paintings at Venice, Chalk [2000], for instance, weren’t based on historical images.

Chalk functions as a point of memory for a story. It was a painting that grew from an anecdote I read: the year I was conceptualizing the exhibition was also the year a colonial police officer, who made the bodies of Lumumba and his cabinet ministers disappear by dissolving them in acid, had died. Before doing away with them—and I guess he had an intuition Lumumba would become a mythic figure—he pulled two teeth from Lumumba’s jaws, which he claimed he threw into the North Sea just before he died. So that presented the idea—I had also painted the mission post where both Mobutu [who ruled the country, which he renamed Zaire, from 1965 to 1997] and Lumumba went to school together—of the failure of the whole acculturation process within that colonial system, which is why I decided on that title. I chose black gloves and the yellow background to emphasize the whiteness within.