A painter’s painter.
Raoul De Keyser was born, lived and passed away in Deinze, Belgium. There were no stints in New York with the Americans; no rendezvous in Paris for inspiration. Inspiration came from the mundane; the ordinary. De Keyser subjects — while always lapping at the fringes of abstraction — are servants of the everyday. Door handles. Chalk lines. A favourite monkey-puzzle tree.
It’s the intimacy of everyday life. Objects and places and things and corners so firmly etched into humdrum familiarity they no longer register as things worth noticing. De Keyser, however, noticed. And painted.
It comes to me as I paced through the cavernous, whitewashed rooms of David Zwirner’s Hong Kong location. How incredible an achievement — yet, too, how finite — to have half-a-lifetime of work summarised in such neat squares and rectangles. Work at its most tangible — framed, hung and walked through in mere minutes.