Painter Adrian Ghenie: ‘I wanted to play right into the fabric of the building’ Caroline Roux on Ghenie's paintings on view in the Chiesa della Madonna, Palermo

The work of the Romanian painter Adrian Ghenie is certainly high on impact. It hits you right between the eyes, and somewhere in the stomach. His roiling canvasses, with figures and faces often worked into a frantic abstraction, have the colour charge of the Renaissance and Baroque paintings he loves, the narrative of Delacroix, tiny details sucked out of Flemish scenes, and nods to Van Gogh, Courbet and Rousseau, all played out in a multiple layering of imagery, much of it dragged from the internet.