Raoul de Keyser, Come on, play it again nr. 4, 2001, oil on canvas, 190.2 x 121.6 cm
2025. Raoul de Keyser
“Touch Game,” an exhibition of canvases by Raoul De Keyser (1930–2012), demonstrated the prowess—technical, conceptual, pictorial—of an artist who was deeply influential to a generation of painters from his native Belgium (e.g., Michaël Borremans, Luc Tuymans) and whose renown extended well beyond the confines of Northwestern Europe. Featuring thirty paintings made between 1970 and 2011, the exhibition showcased De Keyser’s gentle yet implacable abstractions. In them, one could see a masterful tuning of elements, constructed from successive layers of paint that vanished and emerged as the eye took them in.
In Proloog (Prologue) and Clos (Enclosure), both 2003, scattered archipelago-like forms in different shades of green take center stage against densely wrought and intricately constructed backdrops of variegated whites. The emerald shapes, with their irregular contours, seem culled from a particular visual lexicon—one that feels born out of a purely nonobjective realm, devoid of explicit referents. These and two other paintings in the show—Presto and Resume, both from the 2003 “Remnants” series —were conceived from the reordered fragments of abandoned linocut prints the artist created in 1992. These so-called figurative elements subtly complicate any essentialist understandings and relationships between abstraction and representation.
De Keyser’s practice of using older bodies of work to create newer ones underscores the significance of repetition for the artist. However, this approach did not yield predictable results, as we saw in the series “Come on, play it again,” 2001, in which De Keyser incorporates the improvisatory structural aspects of jazz to produce loose compositional arrangements. (It seems inevitable that the title of the series—a common misremembering of a line spoken by Ingrid Bergman’s character in the 1942 film Casablanca—also evokes the artist’s devotion to soccer, which appears to reach all the way back to Kalklijn en twee groenen (Chalk Line and Two Greens), 1970–71, a loose geometric abstraction that indeed resembles a section of a grassy voetbal field.)
The two most significant works in the exhibition, to my mind, were Come on, play it again nr. 2 and Come on, play it again nr. 4. The former, horizontally oriented, presents a group of elliptical forms—executed in shades of orange, plum, coral, and blue—set against a white ground. None of the shapes touch one another or extend to or beyond the boundaries of the rectangular canvas. But a couple of them do bleed—carefully, and only with a minimum of expressionistic zeal—as we saw in the tangerine ovoid squatting in the painting’s upper-left area. Yet in the latter, the rules are delicately inverted: It features amoeba-like outlines, executed in red and green, variously dancing and crashing into one another across a tawny field. Some of the blobs even butt up against the edges of the composition, like clumsy fish in a tall, narrow tank of water. The two works deftly balance play and formal rigor in a way that the other pieces here do not. They are giddy yet controlled, ecstatic but refined.
“Touch Game” exemplifies how De Keyser carried out his hard-won formal experimentation with a deceptively light touch. He deployed a visual grammar that, like an oscillating tide, ebbs and flows with remarkable grace. The artist continually dammed the latent forces that a painting can possess. But when he opens the floodgates, even with the utmost restraint, the effects are astounding.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 63, no. 9, May 2025
In Proloog (Prologue) and Clos (Enclosure), both 2003, scattered archipelago-like forms in different shades of green take center stage against densely wrought and intricately constructed backdrops of variegated whites. The emerald shapes, with their irregular contours, seem culled from a particular visual lexicon—one that feels born out of a purely nonobjective realm, devoid of explicit referents. These and two other paintings in the show—Presto and Resume, both from the 2003 “Remnants” series —were conceived from the reordered fragments of abandoned linocut prints the artist created in 1992. These so-called figurative elements subtly complicate any essentialist understandings and relationships between abstraction and representation.
De Keyser’s practice of using older bodies of work to create newer ones underscores the significance of repetition for the artist. However, this approach did not yield predictable results, as we saw in the series “Come on, play it again,” 2001, in which De Keyser incorporates the improvisatory structural aspects of jazz to produce loose compositional arrangements. (It seems inevitable that the title of the series—a common misremembering of a line spoken by Ingrid Bergman’s character in the 1942 film Casablanca—also evokes the artist’s devotion to soccer, which appears to reach all the way back to Kalklijn en twee groenen (Chalk Line and Two Greens), 1970–71, a loose geometric abstraction that indeed resembles a section of a grassy voetbal field.)
The two most significant works in the exhibition, to my mind, were Come on, play it again nr. 2 and Come on, play it again nr. 4. The former, horizontally oriented, presents a group of elliptical forms—executed in shades of orange, plum, coral, and blue—set against a white ground. None of the shapes touch one another or extend to or beyond the boundaries of the rectangular canvas. But a couple of them do bleed—carefully, and only with a minimum of expressionistic zeal—as we saw in the tangerine ovoid squatting in the painting’s upper-left area. Yet in the latter, the rules are delicately inverted: It features amoeba-like outlines, executed in red and green, variously dancing and crashing into one another across a tawny field. Some of the blobs even butt up against the edges of the composition, like clumsy fish in a tall, narrow tank of water. The two works deftly balance play and formal rigor in a way that the other pieces here do not. They are giddy yet controlled, ecstatic but refined.
“Touch Game” exemplifies how De Keyser carried out his hard-won formal experimentation with a deceptively light touch. He deployed a visual grammar that, like an oscillating tide, ebbs and flows with remarkable grace. The artist continually dammed the latent forces that a painting can possess. But when he opens the floodgates, even with the utmost restraint, the effects are astounding.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 63, no. 9, May 2025
Raoul de Keyser, Come on, play it again nr. 2, 2001, oil on canvas, 130.2 x 190.2 cm
Raoul de Keyser, Kalklijn en twee groenen, 1970-1971, oil on canvas, 150 x 120 cm
Raoul de Keyser, Proloog, 2003, oil on canvas, 140 x 100.6 cm
Raoul de Keyser, Presto, 2003, oil on canvas, 140 x 100.3 cm
Raoul de Keyser, Clos, 2003, oil on canvas, 78 x 98 cm