In his painting for the cover of the June edition of Time magazine, published in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, American artist Titus Kaphar portrayed the pain of the grieving African-American mother. Eyes closed, a black woman in a pose evocative of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus, holds an outline where her child should be. The painting made Kaphar a figure of hate for some, who felt it had no place on the front of the prestigious publication. “It became a place to put their anger and frustration,” he says. “It was another example of how Black Lives Matter was destroying the country.” Kaphar’s latest exhibition, The Evidence of Things Unseen, staged by the Maruani Mercier gallery in a deconsecrated church in Belgium – the country of Jan van Eyck and Peter Paul Rubens – is likely to be no less challenging to some. By grappling with the representation of race in renaissance religious iconography and art, he is exploring his own pain over an absence: the absence of those who look like him from the canvases of the venerated European masters of his own trade. Kaphar’s works attempt to insert that experience, asking the viewer to adjust their gaze, rethink what they are seeing. In his hands, a reproduction of a painting by the 19th century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, depicting Jesus handing the keys to heaven to St Peter, becomes something else. A portrait of a young black man is taped to the surface of the painting over Christ’s face in “a gesture that feels almost like graffiti”, Kaphar says. “It is all those feelings that I was feeling spending time in European museums and longing for pictures that looked like they actually made space for individuals that look like me.” Christ’s outstretched right hand, originally pointing to the heavens, now appears as a plea for help. The show in the former Jesuit Gesù church in the Saint-Josse-ten-Noode district of Brussels, running from 16 October to 28 November, has the potential to stir emotions in a country where the issue of race and discrimination remains an undeveloped debate. Last year, a UN working group of experts on people of African descent said that racial discrimination and marginalisation against Africans remained “endemic” in Belgium. Kaphar, based in New Haven, Connecticut, has faced angry rejection in the past. A painting entitled Behind the Myth of Benevolence, featuring a black woman peering out from behind a rumpled canvas on which is painted a portrait of Thomas Jefferson, was damaged three times when on display at the Smithsonian in New York. A security guard had to stand beside it for the rest of the exhibition. But, for all the regret Kaphar, 44, had initially felt when cast into the public eye by the Time cover, the issues of absence and pain are his stock in trade. Shying away from difficulty would be “unacceptable”, says the father of two young sons. “My regret was erased when I received a letter from a black mother who had lost her son. After seeing the Time magazine cover, she said she had been searching for an image that reflected her loss and pain, and she hadn’t found it until she saw my painting.” He says he is “fascinated” by angry responses. Kaphar, whose mother was 14 when she fell pregnant with him, says he has no interest in attacking Christian communities for their beliefs and narratives. His grandfather was a minister, as was his father “before he fell off the wagon” in drug-flooded Michigan of the 1980s. He and his mother were taken in by a devout Christian family when they later moved to California. “I was raised in the tradition,” he says. His work, he says, is not about erasing or rewriting history. “My whole strategy is not about destroying the path, tearing it all down. The reality is that in order to make what I make, I have to study and understand this traditional technique of making paintings before I alter and revise it in order to say something about where we are in this moment.” Kaphar rejects the framing of the debate about statues of now controversial figures such as the English slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol or Leopold II, the King of the Belgians, who murderously plundered the Congo. “We are having a binary conversation about the sculptures and it goes something like: keep it up or take it down,” he says. “In a binary conversation, I take it down. But I think having it as a binary conversation lacks creativity.” “I think some of these sculptures are of detestable characters and some are detestable in the quality of their art itself,” he says. “These characters represented are something we are realising that we don’t esteem, but the answer doesn’t just need to be to destroy them. These sculptures seem very loud right now because they are the only voice in the room. So one way to dim the volume is to bring other pieces to the public square. What we would have is sculpture that represents where we came from, and then you will have a sculpture of where we are and where we want to be.” The difference between the debate in the US and Europe is telling, he adds. In Europe, the public sculptures are of those who were victors in war and trade. “It is odd in the United States that in many cases the sculpture we are debating are erected in honour of individuals who were in protest to the principles of what has become the United States. These sculptures are erected of people who would have been charged with sedition. They lost. The majority of the sculptures were also not erected at the time of the people they are honouring. They were erected in the 1930s and 1940s when there was a backlash against black people. And that is the part that I have a problem with.”