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 operates on paper created on the eponymous date. Every single is executed in a monochrome plan of pencil, ink, and gesso, and while most refer to paintings the artist experienced currently designed, a few of the motifs would not obtain their way on to canvas for a further couple decades. These formations of hard-angled styles have the rapid, gestural top quality of calligraphy or signage. You start to suspect they make up a sort of language, a suspicion that extends to the accompanying twelve paintings, all much more or a lot less directly similar to that working day in 1990.

De Keyser’s paintings definitely have a graphic and, at initially look, flat character. The straightforward kinds of the paper operates appear below in sunlight-blanched hues: the pink of an outdated Coca-Cola parasol, a black absent cracked and brownish, an unlovable piglike beige. It’s easy to imagine the temptation of the exhibition photographer to support these functions by raising their brightness and contrast in enhancing. But the refined way in which the paintings resist typical attraction, in actuality, only speaks to the difference of their maker. As you spend time with them, the inner lifetime of the performs little by little helps make its way to the surface area, as flatness gives way to errant brush strokes and the tranquil drama of colours competing for light-weight. From finding out the partnership between the “March 7, 1990” sequence and the paintings, we master that language, in De Keyser’s perform, is only a scaffold for a intricate manner of turning into, and that time can by no means be tidily contained by its designation in the calendar, but sprawls or seeps via every single canvas.

— Kristian Vistrup Madsen