The Abstract Renaissance of Raoul de Keyser at SMAK

Raoul de Keyser was a master at making work that embodies the ideas of response and reduction. He responded to reality, intuitively interpreting the visual landscape of his life. But he reduced that visual landscape to its simplest elements, expressing its simplified essence in paint. The oeuvre he created is full of simple, elegant, painterly pictures. Sometimes they seem to recall the physical world—a street scene, a hill, or an athletic field—but never in any overt way. Instead they carry with them the feelings of time and place. In addition to being a prolific artist, de Keyser was also a conscientious journalist and communicator. When he died, he left behind not only hundreds of paintings, drawings and prints, but also an archive of letters, photographs and other ephemera documenting his fascinating personal and professional experiences. The Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Gent, Belgium, just 20 km away from Deinze, where de Keyser lived his entire life, is currently holding an exhibition of his personal archives, through 18 February 2018. Then later in 2018, the museum will open a comprehensive de Keyser retrospective, the first since his death, which will feature more than 150 works made between 1964, the year de Keyser finished his one year of studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Deinze, and 2012, the year he died. Because he was mostly self-taught, de Keyser was often derided by critics who considered him an amateur. But his lack of academic credentials have had no bearing on the lasting quality of his work. Looking back over his oeuvre today, it is easy to see why this subtle genius is now considered by some to be the greatest Belgian abstract painter of the past 50 years.

A New Vision

In the early 1960s, the emerging trend in Flemish art was toward finding ways new ways to engage with the concepts of abstraction and figuration. A small group of artists with this basic common goal came together to call themselves the New Vision. Their belief was that since abstraction had been part of fine art for nearly two generations, they lived in a world in which everyday people were starting to see formal, abstract visual qualities within the visual landscape of the real world. Therefore, abstract elements could be combined with figuration in ways that created new kinds of pictures—pictures of the new abstract reality. Their approach shared much in common with the general idea spreading around the world at the time, that art should have more in common with everyday life.

Within the New Vision movement, artists like Etienne Elias, Alphons Freijmuth, Franz Ringel and Ans Wortel focused heavily on the figurative end of the spectrum, painting lively, brutish portraits of people. Meanwhile, artists like Hans Ebeling Koning, Peter Pongratz and HAP Grieshaber focused more on nature, creating quasi-abstract images of natural landscapes and animals. And a small number of New Vision members, most notably Raoul de Keyser, pushed the idea of figurative abstraction to its minimal extreme, simplifying the figurative elements in the work as far as possible, and magnifying the abstract essence of everyday reality to its limit.

Raoul De Keyser - Correctie, 1973/1982, S.M.A.K. Collection, © 2017 S.M.A.K.

Abstract Realities

The archival exhibition currently on view at S.M.A.K. vividly demonstrates how de Keyser arrived at his distinctive visual language. Using his correspondences, writings and creative journals, the exhibition fleshes out three particular themes that dominate his oeuvre. The first theme focuses on how de Keyser related to his paintings as objects. He saw them as self-referential, ironic things that could be appreciated not only for the subject matter or meaning they carry, but as formal, material things with as much inherent relevance as any other objects in the physical world.

The second theme reconciles the poetic with the pictorial by charting the process of aesthetic simplification that guided de Keyser in his studio. Like a poet who expresses the inexpressible, de Keyser visualized the invisible. He could look at the world and see geometry, patterns and colors, and then look at lines and shapes and colors and see the whole world. The third theme focuses on his photography. The photos he took and collected seem to show a midpoint between three-dimensional physical reality and his two-dimensional paintings. By comparing these photos to his paintings it becomes clear that a simple, graceful process was at work, one that was unpretentious and pure.

Raoul De Keyser - Flank, 1992, S.M.A.K. Collection, © 2017 S.M.A.K.

Pre-Postminimalism

The first time I saw a de Keyser painting, I thought of Richard Tuttle. Tuttle was born 11 years after de Keyser, and a hemisphere away in New Jersey. Tuttle is associated with Postminimalism, a tendency in art first named in the early 1970s. Though a definitive description is hard to verbalize, Postminimalism was generally seen as an attempt to address the simplified visual language of Minimalism in simple, direct ways using everyday materials. I see a direct lineage between Postminimalism and the New Vision. Though both may have been working from different ends, they came together through artists like de Keyser and Tuttle—artists who sought the simplest means by which to make a statement, and who left their work open-ended, allowing the materials and images to transcend their original intent.

What is perhaps most impressive about de Keyser is how impactful his work is, despite its lack of complexity. De Keyser used paint in a way that expressed the love of paint. He made shapes that expressed the love of shapes. He created compositions that expressed the love of seeing relationships between objects in space. He connected the basic building blocks of art making with the basic visual experiences of everyday life. In doing so, he found another connection, which comes through in his work—that between the ancient human need to make pictures of the world, and the contemporary desire to examine what our relationship with that world might mean.

Raoul De Keyser - Hellepoort 7, 1985, S.M.A.K. Collection, © 2017 S.M.A.K.

Featured image: Raoul De Keyser - Grenier 14, 1992, S.M.A.K. Collection, © 2017 S.M.A.K.

All images used for illustrative purposes only

By Phillip Barcio