ART-PRESENTATION: Raoul De Keyser-Oeuvre
For nearly fifty years, Raoul De Keyse created subtly evocative paintings and works on paper which appear at once straightforward and cryptic, abstract and figurative. Composed of basic but indefinable shapes and marks, his works often invoke spatial and figural illusions, though they remain elusive of any descriptive narrative. Despite their sparse gesturing, De Keyser’s works convey a grandeur that inspires prolonged contemplation.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: S.M.A.K. Archive
With 120 works, including several that have never previously been exhibited “Oeuvre” is the first posthumous retrospective of the work of Raoul De Keyser (1930-2012) in a museum. By unfolding De Keyser’s oeuvre both chronologically and thematically, the exhibition design tracks his artistic career from the very beginnings in 1964, when his practice oscillated between Pop Art and Minimalism, to his final works, done in 2012. At the same time, a part of the exhibition sheds light on some of the general characteristics: from frequent overpainting to making smaller and larger versions of existing paintings. Although he derived his visual idiom from seemingly trivial scenes in his immediate surroundings, his practice was in fact devoted unceasingly to the questioning and playful probing of the painting medium. As from his debut in 1964 De Keyser developed highly individual tactile work in which the distinction between the figurative and the abstract dissolved in the poetic alliance it entered into with the painter’s everyday life. His artistic practice emerged from the Nieuwe Visie, a group of painters who sought to reinvigorate certain aspects of European formalism by taking ordinary subjects and reducing them to simple flat shapes and lines. Following experiments with the fundamental elements of painting (color, paint and canvas) that were typical of the 1970s, De Keyser’s visual idiom opened up and became more fluid. This signalled the start of steadily increasing international success, one of the highlights of which was his participation in Documenta IX in 1992. The artist frequently painted over earlier work or revived it in different formats. This game of looking both back and forward is also apparent in his final works. The title of the exhibition is an indication that in a certain sense each of De Keyser’s works includes the notion of a retrospective. Α group of twenty-two works completed shortly before his death in October 2012, and known as “The Last Wall” together they revisit some of the major subjects that occupied the artist throughout his nearly fifty-year long career, including the landscape of the Belgian lowlands where he grew up and lived his entire life, the inconspicuous things close at hand, and the partition of the picture plane. Individually as well as collectively, his works revolve around the activity of painting, but also move beyond its physical means to become more than the sum of their parts. Their apparent simplicity belies a lengthy gestation period, which is guided largely by intuition, rather than by following a pre-existing plan.
Info: Curators: Martin and Bernhart Schwenk, S.M.A.K.-The Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art Ghent, Jan Hoetplein 1, Gent, Duration: 22/9/18-27/1/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 9:30-17:30, Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, http://smak.be
