Staff Picks from the Library: Raoul De Keyser

Posted by Dougal McKenzie October 04, 2023

Staff Picks from the Library: Raoul De Keyser

Some painters you fall in and out of love with, others you just love all the time. Raoul De Keyser is one of the latter for me. A very Belgian painter, whatever that might mean.

I was in Tilburg about 10 years ago (although that's Holland), the De Pont Museum to be precise (it was just after De Keyser had died), when I first encountered his work face-to-face. I wasn't doing 'that' kind of painting back then, but I recognised something in his work which I connected to immediately. Quite different from, say, his compatriot Luc Tuymans, whom I have always been suspicious of (see below).

There's nothing wrong with taking your influences from other painters (as Tuymans certainly does with De Keyser). For instance, the similarities between De Keyser's own early work and that of Roger Raveel are very striking, and De Keyser himself said that Al Held's work also had a formative effect.

What I like most about De Keyser is that he didn't seem to mind that some paintings worked out better than others, he just kind of knew (I feel) that even the weaker ones were still interesting. That's not to say he wasn't self-critical, it's more that he seemed to recognise that there was something intrinsically good in just making any sort of painting. This is a valuable way to look at your own work: yes, come into the studio each day with a self-critical eye, but you'll be surprised to find that if you look hard enough, there will always be something worth hanging onto. Maybe the whole painting in fact. Or you might see a relationship between a good painting and a real stinker, and the two kind of help each other out.

I prefer De Keyser's non-referential paintings to his more image based ones - I don't really like the tree ones for instance, or the football pitch ones. I enjoy the pure mystery of his close-to-abstraction ones. He was also a master of colour relationships, and not-too-precise (but precise-enough) edges.

I think it's important for painters not to care too much about what anyone else thinks about their work. Tuymans is too knowing, too clever for his own good. De Keyser was a true original (like two of my favourite other painters, LS Lowry and Alice Neel). He wasn't playing to the gallery, he was playing with his own pure vision of painting.