Raoul De Keyser at Galerie Barbara Weiss
The title centerpiece of Raoul De Keyser’s exhibition at Galerie Barbara Weiss is “March 7, 1990,” a collection of twelve works on paper created on the eponymous date. Every is executed in a monochrome scheme of pencil, ink, and gesso, and whereas most check with work the artist had already made, a few the motifs wouldn’t discover their approach onto canvas for an additional few years. These formations of hard-angled shapes have the quick, gestural high quality of calligraphy or signage. You begin to suspect they make up a sort of language, a suspicion that extends to the accompanying twelve work, all kind of immediately associated to that day in 1990.
De Keyser’s work definitely have a graphic and, at first look, flat character. The easy types of the paper works seem right here in sun-blanched hues: the crimson of an previous Coca-Cola parasol, a black gone cracked and brownish, an unlovable piglike beige. It’s simple to think about the temptation of the exhibition photographer to assist these works by rising their brightness and distinction in enhancing. However the delicate approach through which the work resist normal enchantment, the truth is, solely speaks to the excellence of their maker. As you spend time with them, the interior lifetime of the works slowly makes its method to the floor, as flatness offers method to errant brush strokes and the quiet drama of colours competing for gentle. From finding out the connection between the “March 7, 1990” collection and the work, we study that language, in De Keyser’s work, is just a scaffold for a fancy mode of changing into, and that point can by no means be tidily contained by its designation within the calendar, however sprawls or seeps via each single canvas.
— Kristian Vistrup Madsen
