A drama lives in every painting by Raoul de Keyser. Even the highest works are entire galaxies that buzz with activity. Still, as curator of Helen Molesworth writes TouchThe current show of the deceased artist in David Zwirner Gallery, De Keyser “” stops the human impulse to give meaning. ”
He cannot always stop the impulse, but the paintings of the Keyser are fascinatingly inscrutable abstractions, without the compositive logic that, for example, land an Abex painting. Instead, he refers to an inner logic that experience their vibrating lines, floating orbs and squares, irregular shapes and even their watery washes. In “Blue Note” (2006), an Azure bottom covers the majority of the modest canvas of the size, are visible brush strokes, both of which indicate the artist’s hand and evoke waves underlined by a few small dots and shapes and a one Large white shape near the soil that could be that could be a land mass in the soil. The composition is so off-catcher, with the white shape that almost touches the bottom of the canvas and the center pure blue, that the dissonance between the materiality of the painting and the image cannot really be the point. It is the clumsiness that stands out, so that potential measurements are discouraged, just as it beckons them.
In “Untitled (Speed)” (1995) a row of green diamonds on a white soil comes into image, like a geometric abstraction on a race to a finish line. The majority of the composition is lubricated, thereby destroying the pattern and, for most artists, the value of the painting – and as a result of promoting a simultaneous sense of mystery and aesthetic error. A similar sensitivity is clear, without lubricating, in other paintings such as “Prologue” and “Clos” (both 2003), in which green shapes that look like paper remains randomly float on a neutral soil. These works create a drama of looking by doing nothing but being tacitly about their own being.
“I … have always searched for forms of obstinacy,” De Keyser said in one interview With historian Hans Thats. Because the obstinacy of his paintings is a product of his unspoken logic, the actors – all those signs and variations that animate every work – play exactly the right roles. The apparent clumsiness is an illusion, just as what seems absurd to one living being, can be meaningful to the other, or for the universe in general. But we don’t have to find out. In this way De Keyser is perhaps the most liberating painter I can think of.
Raoul De Keyser: Touch Game continues in David Zwirner Gallery (519 & 525 West 19th Street, Chelsea, Manhattan) up to and including 1 March. The exhibition was compiled by Helen Molesworth.
