The late Belgian painter Raoul De Keyser (1930–2012) is one of those rare gems in the art world, an artist who left an indelible mark influencing generations of contemporary painters after him. Artist Chris Ofili said of De Keyser, “His paintings exist in that place very few of us dare to go—the silent, the imperceptible.” Among Belgian artists, Harold Ancart described De Keyser’s painting as having no vanity, such that “the work encompasses all sorts of things that happened in the history of painting.” Luc Tuymans, who has not only exhibited with De Keyser, but whose paintings together have at times been the topics of scholarly discussion, said of the artist, “Raoul, for me, resonates as the painter for painters that Albert Marquet once was.” At a time when the art world seems more in favour of new technologies, De Keyser’s paintings are a gentle nudge to the evergreen relevance of painting as a medium and its irreplaceable position in the canon of art.
At David Zwirner Hong Kong, selected paintings spanning the last 25 years of De Keyser’s immense five-decade oeuvre are spread chronologically across two floors. As one makes the journey through each of the four rooms, we are able to observe the breadth of the late artist’s material experimentations with canvas and paint. We are immersed in De Keyser’s surrounding world through works that cumulatively stitch a beautiful, abstracted portrait of his quaint hometown Deinze, in East Flanders, Belgium. De Keyser was born in 1930 in Deinze, where he continued to live and work until his passing in 2012 at the age of 82. The son of a carpenter, De Keyser began to explore painting on his own during his formative teenage years. He went on to study briefly at the Academy of Fine Arts in Deinze between 1963 and 1964 under the painter Roger Raveel, and during this time, participated in New Vision, a Flemish art movement led by Raveel. While in pursuit of painting, De Keyser had a successful, three-decade career as a civil servant working for Ghent University, taking early retirement in 1990 at the age of 60. De Keyser also had a passion for literature and journalism—he befriended writers and poets, and he wrote about sports and arts for local newspapers. The influence of De Keyser’s literary flair seeps into all his paintings.