The Brooklyn Rail

What becomes a “painter’s painter” most? Alternatively, what becomes a painting-painted most? An expansive indeterminacy exists between these relative ideas raising the question as to which may hold more significance. Raoul De Keyser has often been labeled the former (a somewhat ambiguous cliché), but as this collection of his work reveals, his true focus seems to lie in perfecting the latter. His ability to playfully conjure a sense of unselfconsciousness gives his paintings, paradoxically, a rare authenticity, making them feel both dashed off and deeply considered. This subtle balance imparts his art with a unique, not exactly self-effacing character, a quiet confidence that eschews authorial approbation, but simply is—as though it could only be what it is. It’s this delicate play with the illusion of unselfconsciousness that, in the end, sustains his authorship—where an acute awareness of its impossibility somehow becomes the very ground for its realization.

De Keyser’s imagery was most often sourced in his immediate environment, the unremarkable village of Deinze, Belgium, where he maintained his studio for more than thirty years. This habitual engagement with the everyday exerts a pedestrian punch, not unlike Alex Katz’s universal firmament of everyday constellations in his own paintings. For instance, De Keyser’s abstractions based on monkey puzzle trees (a murky version of which can be seen in Untitled [1991]), typical of Belgian suburban boscage, echo Katz’s perennial return to the white pines of his Maine summer retreat. Both artists subtly transform these ordinary subjects into something beyond the familiar. Their shared interest in navigating the razor’s edge between representation and abstraction positions them as quietly strident figures in this ambiguous domain. Yet their paths diverge when it comes to De Keyser’s adjacent forays into “pure” painting—for example, Front (1992), a medium-large vertical canvas which is subtly brushed with a crimson stain floating asymmetrically mid-composition, then “riveted” by Hooker’s green (a staple of the painter’s palette) squiggle-dots seemingly applied directly from the paint tube’s mouth. Here De Keyser exerts his painterly touch most literally as opposed to the game of “guess the reference” he plays in many of his other works. A much smaller composition adjacent, Bleu de ciel (1991–92), sees the artist suggest a field of delicate white bloemen whose heads are smeared blurs atop Hooker’s green “stalks” similarly applied directly via the paint tube. Between these two contemporaneous works lies the gist of De Keyser’s irresolute resolution to reinvent the painted image as potentially both representational and abstract. From such indeterminacy, one inhales a liberatory breath of feeling (touching enough?), where what one chooses to read into his works is ultimately none of the artist’s business.

The show is deftly curated by Helen Molesworth to convey how De Keyser’s light-footed, lyrical navigation between mundane memory and painterly alchemy remained a constant throughout his career. Distinct variations on this see-saw theme abound in the show, from the Bernard Piffaretti-esque pairing of Come on, play it again nr. 7 and nr. 8 (both 2001), to the alternatively outlined and filled abstract “potatoes”¹ of Come on, play it again nr. 2 and nr. 4 (both 2001). An example of one of his best-known color field/soccer pitch abstractions is seen here in Kalklijn en twee groenen (Lime [or chalk] line and two greens) (1970–71), an early introduction into De Keyser’s wry literary wit (he was an arts and sports journalist for a time) juxtaposing a literal playing field with the art historically charged “field” of Leo Steinberg’s “flatbed picture plane.” The agonistic back and forth of such zones of contention is a sly analogy for the artist’s experience of painterly call and response in the studio, not unlike the pitch of Harold Rosenberg’s Abstract Expressionist “arena.” As the artist elaborated in a studio interview, “Things can sometimes be aggressive between me and a canvas. For me, much of the pleasure of painting lies in taking the risk, in experiencing that risk. In a certain sense I am also an actor for myself. I confront myself with obstacles in order to overcome them.”²

What this survey conveys is that, for Raoul De Keyser, painting was an enactment of what a grand game could be made from a pursuit of the trivial—and that he envisioned his role in it as far from a trivial pursuit.