It’s been ten years since Raphael Rubinstein’s essay ‘Provisional Painting’ (2009) defined a long-smouldering painterly ethos. Depending on your sympathies, this style of dislocated and often hesitant brush-marks, deployed without concern for any recognizable standard of composition, represented either an incongruous punk-asceticism or a cynical daubing in the sad residue of painting. Within the diversifying landscape of contemporary art, painting seemed of its authority, but Rubinstein’s articulation of a ‘tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling’ aesthetic suggested a way to keep touching brush to canvas while eliding the medium’s conservatism. In the intervening years, memory of this approach and its spirit has become muddied. A kind of mannered, off-handed painting – variously derided as ‘crapstraction’ or ‘zombie formalism’ – took over, its conveyor-belt production fed by the blue-chip market.
Hence the pertinence of Raoul De Keyser’s retrospective, ‘Oeuvre’. The late Belgian painter was Rubinstein’s opening case study, and S.M.A.K.’s capacious presentation – spanning 1964 to the artist’s death in 2012 – reminds us what the painting that inspired the essay really felt like. From the vantage point of 2018, De Keyser’s concerns – the painterly flickering between flatness and depth; the elusive presence of the grid; the flowing of cracks and shadows – might seem familiar. But here, through the deceptive texture of De Keyser’s project, it is affect that sounds, with moments of perceptible strangeness jarring like pitch changes or unexpected turns of phrase.
This reduced language has vibrant origins. Many works from the late 1960s and ’70s see canvases wrapped around stretchers and slim rectangular boxes and painted in opaque arrangements of green, yellow, blue and black. De Keyser’s inspiration for these pieces – Homage to Brusselmans (1969–70), for example – was a football pitch, visible through the artist’s window, which he transmuted through a slightly depressive interpretation of pop painting. At points, this self-referential approach risks navel-gazing. In another room dedicated to De Keyser’s early works, many green and black paintings, gridded or overlaid with white stripes, read like a pensive breath – more for him than us. But, invariably, the mark-making and palette loosen ups up and diligent improvisation reigns. One floating crescendo of small canvases echo our stained, ripped, blotted visual reality. Z.T. (2012) is a thin drag of red paint on diluted white, descending from a protruding nail; Overflow (2012) is a rough yellow and green grid inscribed in chalky pink, like a game of tic-tac-toe lingering on a pavement.