Raoul De Keyser

Memento mori? Celebration? It’s hard to say. In “The Last Wall,” 2012, Raoul De Keyser’s final twenty-two paintings are hung here as they appeared in his studio when he died—hooks, nails, staples and all. With an additional twenty-six works from four decades, this exhibition manages to fill out the history of the private Belgian painter, for whom international success came late.

With De Keyser, we always look onto a gray world lacking sunlight and intense color. Although his quasi-landscape paintings invariably appear slightly sullied and meteorologically estranged, their subdued color is always specific. Their scumbled off-white backgrounds, stained in indescribable anomalies of beige or cream, never repeat themselves. The often haggard overpainting, prone to apparent clumsiness, error, and indecisive adjustment, is likewise distinguished by fine attunement of the kind of contaminated color that no other painter would use.

De Keyser never shed his Pop beginnings in references to soccer pitches, for there are retentions of touchline geometry in Untitled, 2012, with its white stripe bisecting a red rectangle, and Grenier 2, 1990, where blocks of color flank a beige field. Moreover, coaching-strategy diagrams resonate in the titles and scattered marks of Recover and Starter, both 2003. This show persuasively reveals De Keyser’s intimate address to his local landscape, where incomplete smudges evoke responses to sodden fields and vanishing shorelines, as if observed through a steamed-up windshield. These works are best when on the cusp of adequacy, confounding us with indiscernible equivalences that De Keyser felt were the most we could salvage from landscape, geometry, and painting.