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 series of twelve will work on paper developed on the eponymous day. Each individual is executed in a monochrome scheme of pencil, ink, and gesso, and although most refer to paintings the artist experienced now manufactured, a couple of the motifs would not locate their way onto canvas for a different several several years. These formations of challenging-angled shapes have the speedy, gestural high quality of calligraphy or signage. You begin to suspect they make up a type of language, a suspicion that extends to the accompanying twelve paintings, all much more or less straight similar to that day in 1990.

De Keyser’s paintings definitely have a graphic and, at first look, flat character. The easy kinds of the paper functions appear right here in sunshine-blanched hues: the red of an aged Coca-Cola parasol, a black absent cracked and brownish, an unlovable piglike beige. It’s uncomplicated to envision the temptation of the exhibition photographer to aid these will work by expanding their brightness and distinction in enhancing. But the subtle way in which the paintings resist normal attraction, in actuality, only speaks to the difference of their maker. As you shell out time with them, the interior life of the is effective slowly tends to make its way to the surface, as flatness offers way to errant brush strokes and the tranquil drama of colours competing for light-weight. From finding out the marriage in between the “March 7, 1990” series and the paintings, we find out that language, in De Keyser’s operate, is only a scaffold for a complex mode of becoming, and that time can by no means be tidily contained by its designation in the calendar, but sprawls or seeps as a result of every single single canvas.

— Kristian Vistrup Madsen