Raoul De Keyser: Touch Game

Made up of simple shapes and painterly marks, De Keyser’s works allude to the natural world and representational imagery while avoiding suggestions of narrative or reductive frameworks that limit experience and interpretation. De Keyser’s ability to find new and exciting ways to invigorate his surfaces resulted in his reception as a major influence for contemporary painters—“an artist’s artist.”

The artist’s inclusion in Jan Hoet’s highly celebrated Documenta 9 in Kassel, Germany, in 1992 signaled a serious turning point in the artist’s career as he started to gain greater international recognition. Several of the works in the exhibition are from this time, including Front (1992), which was featured at Documenta.

Among the late-period works that will be on view are several paintings from De Keyser’s seminal Come on, play it again series from the early 2000s. The group of works was first presented at the artist’s inaugural show with the gallery at its original Greene Street location in New York in 2001.

Each of these works seems to follow a different compositional logic, while nevertheless relying on a canny use of biomorphic and geometric forms, squares, lines, and dots. The title of the series carries a musical connotation, as if encouraging an improvisational jazz pianist, while simultaneously suggesting the possibility of infinite variation.

Among the works that will be on view are several paintings from the 1980s, including representative works from De Keyser’s important Zinkend and Hellepoort series, which reflect a notable turn in the artist’s practice toward more dynamic, gestural facture. Specific formal elements recur in these and several other seminal paintings from the 1980s and 1990s.

Resume debuted at Remnants, De Keyser’s 2003 solo exhibition at David Zwirner New York. It is one of several works from that time that De Keyser based on the fragments of a linocut print that he’d made ten years prior. As curator Martin Germann notes about these works, “The often whimsical landscape paintings—the painterly translation of fragmented traces of work suggests watersides, horizons, sky and the like—are further variants in a familiar economy: remnants of old images create cascades of new images, what went before is honed into an open present. De Keyser remained in the production loop of a network that, driven by change, was continuously reactivated anew.”

Though De Keyser has been the subject of numerous surveys and solo exhibitions at museums and institutions in Europe since the 1970s, this exhibition will be a rare opportunity for New York audiences to experience the breadth of his practice, his beguiling sense of color, his deft and delicate surfaces, and his sometimes poetic, sometimes mysterious, sometimes rigorously formal paintings.