Raoul De Keyser against the impulse of meaning

New York,

When thirteen years have passed since his death, David Zwirner, the room that represented Raoul de Keyser from 1999 until his death, will host “Touch Game”, a new exhibition dedicated to the Belgian creator: it will be the largest among those that have been offered to him. to date, both in New York and London and in Hong Kong, and will be curated by Helen Molesworth. Although it will house works from all phases of his career, the strong point of the tour will be the pieces from his period of maturity, approximately between 1980 and 2000, when this author undertook a deep investigation into the expressive potential of abstract painting in populated compositions. by simple shapes and marks that, although they implicitly allude to the natural world, and therefore to the figurative universe, avoid suggesting specific narratives so as not to limit the viewer’s experience and interpretation. Their surfaces transition between subtlety and vigor.

We will be able to see pieces from his series from the eighties in New York Zinkend and Hellepoortrepresentative of the beginning in De Keyser of a more dynamic and gestural path that he would continue to carve in the following decade and that had one of its hallmarks in the so-called “chalk line”: he had already begun to incorporate them before, in the seventies, and They would become recurrent as the artist observed their constant presence in the immediate environment, especially in sports venues; In some canvases they become parallel crossbars that divide the support into registers, in other soft strokes of white they contrast with more frenetic applications of pigment, generating a kind of visual syncopation that unifies the entire composition.

De Keyser’s participation in the ninth edition of Documenta in Kassel, in 1992, marked a turning point in his career and the consolidation of his international recognition; several of the compositions collected in David Zwirner correspond to this moment, among them Frontwhich was exhibited at that same event, and some will be unpublished in the United States: they are characterized by the dissolution of the distances between figures and backgrounds to integrate sensual clouds or diffuse stripes and blurs.

Among his most recent works that arrived in New York we can mention those from the series Come on, play it againwhich the artist first presented at this same gallery (then based on Green Street) in 2001; In his latest production, each of the works could follow a different compositional logic, although they all start from the bold use of biomorphic and geometric shapes, squares, lines and points. The title of that ensemble offers obvious musical connotations: it seems to encourage the improvisations of a jazz pianist or suggest the possibility of infinite variations in sound and visuals.

Molesworth has pointed out that De Keyser’s paintings would seek to stop, from softness, the human impulse to find meaning in what he sees: they display the everyday, moving away from the obvious, insisting on the accumulations, close to everyone, of small forms and gestures capable of to intensify and focus our attention at a time when it is increasingly dispersed. Precisely the title of this exhibition, “Touch Game”, refers to our potential to notice, far from it, the lightness, poetry and mystery, which he tries to convey in his canvases from formal rigor. The visual intensity that his work manages to transmit will, therefore, be unexpected, and left its mark on a good number of later abstract artists.