FEATURES ARCHIVE

Highly acclaimed in Belgium and with an international reputation on the rise, Raoul de Keyser is making history, and with regular exhibitions in Antwerp, Berlin, Munich and Vienna, de Keyser is steadily taking on the world.

De Keyser’s paintings occupy a space that hovers between abstraction and figuration. They provoke fleeting impressions of reality through the medium of abstraction. Much of de Keyser’s work is seen to be rooted in both Pop Art and Minimalism, inspired by real life, close to his own, yet constantly teetering on the edge of pure objective interpretation. Aesthetically, what is truly striking about the works in this auction is their simple elegance, depicted through the use of unadulterated colour, the bravery of lines in space, capable of triggering something emotional in the viewer.

These pictures are also often elusive, giving a sense of vision yet deliberately leaving it somehow incomplete. In this sense, Untitled is the entry point: clearly depicting a staircase, this work looks back to de Keyser’s early paintings from the 1960s. It was then that de Keyser abandoned his career as a sports journalist, and instead took to the easel. These paintings emphasise the signature de Keyser umbilical link to the recognisable, inhabitable world yet the subject has also been reduced, pared back to an almost Minimalist, elegant progression of forms ascending the surface itself.