In the space of a relatively short career, the painter, etcher and photographer Jozef Van Ruyssevelt (1941–1985) created a rich and intense body of work that is still far too little known. He excelled in his use of colour and chiaroscuro, his everyday surroundings providing an inexhaustible source of inspiration for him: furniture, utensils, plants, walls, windows, foliage, grass and the countryside beyond. Van Ruyssevelt’s style is marked by the same abrupt transitions that typified his sometimes exuberant, sometimes despondent personality.
 
This book presents a large number of essential works, many not previously reproduced, supplemented by photographs from the artist’s personal archive that are likewise published here for the first time.
 
His visual work includes a variety of gouaches visited by the ghosts of Turner, Constable, Van Gogh, Hopper, Twombly and Rothko. All the same, a ghost is not an influence: Van Ruyssevelt did not draw on their paintings directly, nor would he have wished to. The works in question hint at a mysterious, secret pact between painters and the Art of Painting. In this sense, the ‘visit’ in the book’s title is also a ‘visitation’.