Raoul De Keyser: Whitechapel Art Gallery, London

on what account has Raoul De Keyser's art assumed international prominence in the last decade? Not single is he the wrong age--over sixty when his work finally began to filter on the outside over the Belgian border in the early '90 now in his seventies for his first retrospective, comprising a certain quantity of seventy-five paintings from 1963 to the present--but his work doesn't appear to be to have much to do with the big issues of novel painting: Although not programmatically abstract nor based upon reduction to the monochrome or the mechanization of the painting proces neither does it evince any special fixation upon the medium's relation to the photographic image, popular tillage the readymade, or linguistic signification. And while the dichotomy between phenomenon and image does seem important to De Keyser's early work--Slice III, 1969 leans against the wall like a John McCracken plank, while Zevende Linnen Doos (Seventh Linen Box) 1971 stands upon the floor and is painted upon all five visible sides--it has lengthy since become a merely tacit regard Not that the painter appear to bes anxious to avoid these varied issues; certain works approach them--Ground, 1971/1995 with its white lines upon green, clearly depicts a sports field and thus might be discussed in metes of popular culture and the everyday; Z 1990 is a monochrome--but by means of way of curiosity, not commitment. Likewise, the paintings have bring under rules but it is as hard to discern their significance as it is to dismiss them as solely a formalist's armature for picture building. Walking past individual wall at the Whitechapel, for instance, I could diocese that Untitled (Suggestion), 1995, might present to view the legs of a swimmer immersed in the water, that Bleu de Ciel (Sky Blue) 1992 is a field of flowers, and that Einden (Ends) 1992 depicts a pair of slim tree trunks (there is little relation to urban life in De Keyser's oeuvre); on the other hand in the brushy field of pale pink sown with bits of peach in Tors, 1992 I could single wonder where to find the torso promised by dint of the title--unless the word is meant in the faculty of perception of "fragment"? In any case, the motif permeates the painting without defining its meaning.

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What makes De Keyser's paintings in the way that timely, so attractive to younger artists, may be their self-conscious vulnerability, their faculty of perception of unfoundedness and indifference to "the discourse," the talking points that can in the way that easily distract from the deeper question at issue they merely point to: that everything about art, as Theodor Adorno one time said, "has become problematic: its inner life, its relation to society, smooth its right to exist." Not that De Keyser direct the eyes to be agonizing about this, mind you--even that would be to give it a sort of false importance. on the other hand certain of De Keyser's works, where, as Adrian Searle places it in his catalogue essay, "nothing looks to remain except residue," speak as poignantly to this condition as individual could imagine, and all the more for a like reason as De Keyser does not make a mode or a fetish of it. His answer to the situation of painting eschews melodrama, opting (here Searle borrows from Susan Sontag's description of the Romanian aphorist EM Cioran) for "nuance, irony, and refinement." At the same time, there is actual little sense of development in De Keyser's oeuvre; a painting from the late '70 can gaze very much like one made today. nevertheless he certainly does get better, in the faculty of perception that the more recent paintings are more clearly or intensely what the earlier singles already were--only now more nuanced, more ironic, more refined. And surprisingly, De Keyser's consistency coexists with an most distant liberty.

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With De Keyser painting becomes what it has hardly at any time been--something like what Gilles Deleuze called a minor language, or in Manny Farber's more resonant phrase, a termite art. The paintings, generally of unpretending scale, don't look like they were made with top-of-the-line paints or with the greatest in quantity solid of stretchers; there's an iffiness about them that looks to go right down to their materials. There is frequently something a bit grimy or blanched about their color, as if they didn't want to be too noticeable. The paint handling can gaze almost slapdash, and where it becomes more vigorous, this can be read as betraying frustration rather than insouciant bravura. And at the same time that slapdash handling gradually begins to appear to be surpassingly sensitive--or is it? The grubby color, novel and beautifully calibrated--but is it, really? The faculty of perception of doubt never quite goe away. These are paintings upon the edge of emptiness, of awkwardness, of a sort of visual inaudibility, and plane when you see them as beautiful--as I do--their beauty somehow or other incorporates rather than banishes those qualities and therefore always perceive s threatened from within.

"Raoul De Keyser" (curated by means of Hendrik Driessen, director, De Pont Foundation; Ulrich Loock substitute director, Fundacao de Serralves; and Anthony Spira, curator, Whitechapel Art Gallery) travels to the Musee Departemental d'Art Contemporain de Rochechouart, June 5-Aug. 29; De Pont Foundation, Tilburg, clan 11-Jan. 9, 2005; Fundacao de Serralves, Porto, Jan. 2005-Apr. 2005; Kunstmuseum St Gallen, May 2005-Aug. 2005