Dutch artist Rob Scholte, 40 this month, speaks from his Amsterdam studio about the bomb attack three years ago which almost killed him. "My best weapon against this is my work - perhaps not the only weapon. But the best I have." ‘This’ is the fact that Scholte lost both his legs in the explosion on Eerste Laurierdwarsstraat, a quiet narrow street in the artistic Jordaan district of Amsterdam.

Walking the deserted road today on a peaceful June evening, it’s very hard to imagine either the noise of the explosion or the burning dark blue BMW. Scholte remembers it all with a frightening clarity. "I heard a ticking sound - three ticks...tick...tick...tick," He pauses and precisely demonstrates with his hand, re-living the moment for the viewer to comprehend the full impact. "Then, this wall of fire was in front of me. White light. Not so much an explosion as an implosion."

Wall of Fire is the title of one of his ‘Obsessie’ series of paintings executed since the attack. It depicts in Scholte’s usual simple graphic style, the interior of a BMW engine with a canister of nitro glycerine resting on the fuel tank. The reality of the incident however is not so clear or simple. The police are yet to pin the attack on anyone, although Scholte himself has always had a list of suspects whom he has accused in a very public way. He has appeared on television and named former assistants and colleagues whom he believes have envied and hated him enough to want him dead, citing diaries and letters which he claims are evidence of complicity.

Some of these documents figure in his latest exhibition of paintings at the Jan van der Togt gallery in Amstelveen, replicated in passionate detail and reflecting Scholte’s own obsession with the shattered mosaic of truth that he has committed himself to piecing together. Despite several people having been questioned on suspicion of the bombing, the police have failed to bring charges against anyone and although the case remains officially open, it seems that they are no closer to establishing the identity of the perpetrator. In a bizarre twist to the case, Scholte himself even came under suspicion, asked by the police if he had done it ‘for the publicity.’ Shortly after the attack, Scholte exhibited a new work of art - the burned out shell of his BMW. Scholte had bought it back from the insurance company and put it on display - an icon of terror.

The reaction he received from the Dutch public was unsympathetic. Unused to such violence on their peaceful streets but nevertheless impatient with what they regard as the over - emotionality of Scholte and his allegations, Scholte became, and in some ways still is, dismissed as an embarrassment. "People said it was my artwork but it was not. It was the artwork of that fucker who wouldn’t reveal himself." Certainly, the shock aspect of the whole affair has not been lost on Scholte. He also tried to reclaim his amputated legs from the hospital - ‘they’re mine’ - but they had been incinerated. One wonders if they had not been, whether the Dutch artgoing public would have been treated to a Damien Hirst-style display of the artist’s severed limbs suspended in formaldehyde.

His wife, Mickey Hoogendijk’s, part in the Scholte affair is understated. Twelve years his junior and manager of his company, she too was in the car when it exploded and, though only lightly wounded, lost the child she was carrying. By a cruel irony, the reason for their journey that day was a doctor’s appointment to have Mickey’s pregnancy confirmed. It was the second time the couple had known the loss of a child - their first was stillborn. While Scholte’s anger at this is clear and dramatic, Mickey’s appears complex. A beautiful cool blonde, she speaks calmly of the night which changed her life with a dispassion that is in complete contrast with Scholte’s intensity. "Perhaps two or three people know for sure what happened. Perhaps one day we shall find out and that will be okay. Perhaps we will never find out, and that is okay, too."

Her husband cannot reach the same intellectual and emotional compromise - and it was one of the reasons that they separated. Scholte, who now lives on Tenerife and won’t return to the Netherlands ‘until justice is done’, has done a lot of thinking on the way back from his violent encounter. He’s working on his biography, due out later this year - "I won’t call it my autobiography", he says. "Auto is the Dutch word for car." - and in the process has looked at both himself and others more deeply to find an explanation for what has happened. "Jealousy is a disease," he says. "It’s an illness that poisons the mind, especially in relationships. I’ve had to look closely into parts of myself that I didn’t want to look at before." Foremost in his soul-searching, the grim mind-games that he has been playing ever since the attack, is perhaps the effect he has had on others - and in particular the person in whom he has inspired such murderous intentions.

Certainly the Amsterdam art world has come out of all this as a small, poisonous place where jealousies and egos clash over the triple crown of fame, money and critical acclaim. Scholte had achieved all three and in the success-hungry decade of the Eighties when his star rose to the ascendant, he revelled in everything that there was on offer. Despite his beginnings as a punk anarchist playing in a rock band and violent confrontation with the police during the housing riots of the Eighties’ kraak movement, Scholte’s talent brought him positive recognition. Drugs, beautiful women and the lifestyle of the fabulous almost became his birthright. In November 1994, within the charred remains of his dark blue BMW, the party came to an abrupt finish.

It is perhaps another irony of Scholte’s life that he has gone from precocious drug rebel to disabled moral activist, engaging on a clean-up crusade of Amsterdam’s streets. There’s much work to do. Shortly after he left hospital, Scholte gave a press conference at Schiphol Airport in which he released a fax that had been sent to him by the self-styled ‘ Neerlandica Nostra’. It appeared that the underworld of the Colombian drugs barons and the artistic echelons of the Dutch cultural scene met on the streets of Amsterdam and Scholte became part of that encounter. The danger Scholte now faces in artistic terms is that people will associate him more for the attack on his life than for his work. Certainly his obsession with bringing the criminal to justice colours everything he does. His style has changed. The pop art Disney colours - ‘ cartoons for adults’ as he once described his work - are now servicing weightier themes and reflect Scholte’s increasing introspection and re-assessment of his identity. His concern with green issues and anti-war themes have involved him in painting the Greenpeace tram in Amsterdam and a replica of the Palais Huis Ten Bosch in a Nagasaki amusement park, the world’s largest piece of art which, despite the bomb attack, a commission Scholte managed to finish on time. He has also been asked to make a mural for the Reichstag in Berlin later this year. One wonders what his theme will be when he has been quoted as saying he’s ‘the Dr. Mengele of visual art.’

Piecing together old familiar images and juxtaposing them to make something new has been the hallmark of Scholte’s work. The challenge for him now is to re-invent himself in the light of his experience. The King of Imitation has become an original - let’s hope he learns to live with the white space on the canvas until time and truth emerge to fill in the missing parts of the picture.