Raoul de Keyser (1930 – 2012)

Image coming soon.

On the occasion of Belgian painter Raoul de Keyser passing at age 82, Sharon Butler posts a video of de Keyser's March 2001 artist talk at the Renaissance Society in Chicago.

Writing about de Keyser's 1981 Hill Series, Barry Schwabsky notes that one painting "contains a single large five-sided shape in black ink, its edges nearly parallel with those of the sheet on which it has been drawn, except that one of its upper corners has been replaced by a diagonal line, like the slope of a hill. There is some bare white paper around all the sides of the resulting irregular pentagon, so that despite the reference to nature that the title insists on, it always remains a closed shape, never becoming a view of something larger. The trick–this short-circuiting of reference and abstraction–is simple but effective, so much so that it could easily have been irritating, except that the execution of it is so blunt and unpretentious that the quizzical feeling evoked by this play, not only between abstraction and image but between earnest concentration and triviality, evokes an almost childlike freshness of vision."

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