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Looking for the Ultimate Painting
Thoughts on the Work of Raoul de Keyser
The Flemish painter Raoul de Keyser was born in Deinze in 1930; despite his comparative age, however, he belongs to the younger generation of his country's artists. The reason behind this seeming anomaly is that this is an artist who has constantly renewed himself and who is for ever on the lookout for a way of returning painting to its basic premises. What concerns him, in fact, is the uncertainties he has about expressing his emotions, how to record them from one painting to the next, and the impossibility of portraying all this in a single work.
De Keyser did not begin to paint until he was 33 years old. He had previously made some attempts in that direction but they gave him no satisfaction. Along with his regular work he was also involved in sports journalism and art criticism. But he was still infected with the painting bug. In winter 1963 he signed up for the painting course at the Municipal Academy in his home town of Deinze, a course taught by Roger Raveel (see The Low Countries 1993-94: 64-68), a painter with a considerable national reputation. At this time abstract art was still in its heyday everywhere, but Raveel was not involved in it. In his highly personal work Raveel developed what he called ‘The New Vision’, a kind of simple figuration whose components were objects from or fragments of his immediate surroundings and the rural landscape in which he lived.
De Keyser too took this approach when he began to paint, as did many of those influenced by Raveel. But through his artistic and intellectual interests De Keyser was also conscious of current developments in the visual arts in the United States, particularly Pop Art and Colourfield Painting. Raveel's new, fresh figurative interpretation, Pop Art's almost aggressive reworking of everyday reality and the investigation of the significance of colour by the Colourfield Painters together formed the stock on to which De Keyser would graft his art. At first he chose subjects which were close at hand and familiar to him: a section of road, a cycle, a garden hose, a door-latch or a football pitch, trivial motifs with no intrinsic artistic or cultural significance. The strange thing was that, while he was clearly depicting a piece of reality, this was not what the painting was really about. What he was seeking to express was not so much the subject of the painting but, above all, that painting's
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Raoul de Keyser, Baron in Al Held-Field. 1964-1966. Canvas, 105 × 80 cm (Photo by Ph. Daem).
structure. The subject remained recognisable; but through his treatment of it he revealed its structural possibilities, accentuating the colour, the tensions of diagonals, the marginalising of certain figurative elements which were pushed away to the edges or corners of the painting. These were his first attempts at dealing with an issue which was to preoccupy him throughout his career.
That issue can be defined as the problem of the meaning of a painting, the method of giving form to that meaning and the investigation of the possibilities of expressing in it the artist's feelings and wishes. A journey of exploration, then, into the essence of what a painting should be, within the two-dimensionality characteristic of it. Curiously enough, at a very early stage in his evolution De Keyser decided that he needed to move beyond that two-dimensionality; and so he developed his so-called ‘linen boxes’, four-dimensional paintings which stood free in space and themselves functioned as spatial objects. The titles of these works still referred to scenes from reality such as ‘campsite’ or ‘field scene’, with an indication of nature, but already the subject was handled in a much more abstract way. These boxes
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soon evolved into ‘slices’, narrow upright frames with canvas stretched across them, painted at first in oils and later in acrylic. They were placed against a wall but free-standing, and still showed very slight references to reality. In a subsequent phase these slices were integrated into paintings which were then termed ‘slice-landscapes’ or ‘field-exercises with slice’. Through all these works, and later ones also, the reality which was De Keyser's point of departure developed into a quasi-abstract datum, making it clear that these are exercises in giving meaning to line, colour and structure within the rules of a painting.
Gradually he began to move towards a more geometric model, but one in which the lyrical element was never totally lacking since the lines and curves were clearly painted by hand, giving the work a lyrical tenderness. In the course of this manifest process of refinement the artist added grey to his palette, with sometimes a minimal touch of colour at the edge of the canvas. In drawings of this period, too, the white sheet is filled with horizontal or vertical lines with nuances of thick and thin so that within the overall field subordinate areas appear, like a composite of rhythmic patterns. One of this painter's characteristics is that he will suddenly interrupt certain experiments in order to explore new insights. So it happens that after a series dominated by grey he switches to dark canvasses painted in an expressionist style, after which bright colours again predominate. The reader or viewer might see this as indicative of a certain instability; for De Keyser, however, it is the mark of an almost desperate search for the essence of what, for him, a painting should be. Variations in format, large or small, the substance of
Raoul de Keyser, Tornado. 1971-1981. Canvas, 36.5 × 36 cm (Photo by Ph. Daem).
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Raoul de Keyser, Six for P (6). 1986. Canvas, 60 × 50 cm. Zeno X Gallery (Photo by Dirk Braeckman).
the support, fine or coarse linen, the type of paint, oil or acrylic, are so many factors illustrating the problem of ‘painting’. This is why in his case one can speak of a discontinuity within a continuity. Discontinuity, because the structured and the lyrical, the calm and the violent, the light and the dark are constantly alternating, just as in every individual there is a constant struggle for priority between emotion and rationality. Continuity, because each work grows out of the one before it so that the urge to achieve, eventually, the perfect painting is always there. Within that continuity there is another important element in De Keyser's work, and perhaps the most important of all, because it goes to the heart of his art. That one painting should grow out of the other so that perfection remains unattainable is an intellectual and / or philosophical attitude which is not exclusive to painting. What is basic to this painter, is the expression of that striving in visual form.
Quite distinct from the significance of a painting's content is the manner of painting, which as it were reveals the catharsis of the mental doubts and uncertainties which influenced its creation. In more concrete terms: to start with there is a datum which may sometimes be anecdotal but most often comes from a feeling or a mood. This abstract datum then has to be transmuted
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Raoul de Keyser, Shelter. 1989. Canvas, 60 × 50 cm. Zeno X Gallery (Photo by Marc van Geyte).
into pictorial form as a drawing, gouache, water-colour or painting. An author can draft a text but will, at intervals in the work or subsequently, make corrections, scrap passages or rewrite them; the painter sets to work in the same way, but is additionally faced with the question of the meaning of the painting as bearer of a pictorial message. This is what De Keyser is concerned with, and one can read it in his work as in a writer's manuscript. In his case, however, the painting is never completely finished, it is an attempt to which he will return (hence the series in which he habitually works); but each attempt is also an independent investigation into the essence of a painting. This can also be seen in the way he paints, for very often the colour of the canvas itself is still visible here and there, as are areas that have been overpainted, scraped off or redone, while the fact that the paintings are almost always exhibited unframed enables the attentive viewer to follow the evolutionary process by studying the edges of the painting and the successive layers of colour still visible there.
Raoul de Keyser's whole oeuvre should in fact be regarded as one ‘work in progress’, a constant evolution from one painting to the next. Each work is actually a struggle with himself and with painting. Every series, every individual painting even, is a result of this struggle, sometimes with a different
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Raoul de Keyser, Ends. 1991-1992. Canvas, 70 × 50 cm. Zeno X Gallery (Photo by Kristien Daem).
approach, a different formal structure, a different use of colour. And it is this process of adaptation, self-correction, overpainting, changing, that is fascinating in his work and shows with what youthful élan the artist still, in the autumn of his days, devotes himself to painting. His significance lies not so much in the recollection of reality as in the search for the ultimate painting, of which all that had gone before are the recollections.
ludo bekkers
Translated by Tanis Guest.
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Further reading
| Unbound, Possibilities in Painting (Joint exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery). London, 1994. |
| bekkers, ludo, ‘Raoul de Keyser’, in: bekkers, ludo and elly stegeman, Contemporary Painting of the Low Countries. Rekkem, 1995, pp. 92-95. |
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