Raoul De Keyser Paintings 1980-1999

Raoul De Keyser's mainly abstract art is remarkable for its dimensional realism--that is, its connection of the subjective and objective dimensions of experience. De Keyser personalizes abstraction, he gives it a human face; many of his pictures include motifs drawn from his immediate surroundings or his own personal experience. Instead of searching for an overarching formal principle--as did the pioneers of abstraction from Kandinsky's time through the 1960s--De Keyser attunes his art to the significance of improvisation and chance in all life, and contemporary life in particular. Thus we find in the art of Raoul De Keyser much of the contingency, inconsistency, textual precariousness, modal variety, particularity, unpredictability, disorder and flux that we find in our daily lives. This catalogue, published on the occasion of a touring exhibition of De Keyser's work, documents in sumptuous reproductions the artist's oeuvre over the past twenty years.