An ash-grey man walks through a desolate landscape, a shadow behind him. In front of him is a brown smudge which he almost puts his left foot into. The painting suggests movement through time: the past, present and future are depicted as three steps. The grey shadow is that of a man from the past: Raveel’s father. The brown stain appears to be a step in the future, the ‘improbability’. In between we see a realistically-painted man: the painter himself, in the present time. On the right there is a green square, with inside it a tilted red square on grass. It does not seem to have anything to do with the rest of the painting: it is like a painting within a painting. The unnatural square symbolised the spiritual realm for Raveel. The combination of figuration and abstraction is characteristic for Raveel. Like Alphons Freymuth and Reinier Lucassen, he was part of the New Figuration in the 1970s, an art movement typified by references to diverse styles and the work of others. Raveel remained loyal to this approach: ‘Stepping into improbability’ dates from 1994.