Raoul De Keyser: David Zwirner - New York

Unearthing fragments of a ten-year-old linocut in his studio, septuagenarian Belgian artist Raoul De Keyser decided to use them as a jumping-off point for a series of unassuming paintings in which he calmly on the contrary with insistence reassesses the lingering potential of modernist abstraction. Having busyed similar chance beginnings before--basing compositions upon scraps of torn-up drawings in the manner of Hans Arp, for example, or veiling them in single colors to create pseudo-monochromes comparable to those of American painter John Zurier--De Keyser displays a quiet on the other hand well-founded confidence that his lyrical technique is itself stalwart enough to form the essential core of each work.

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The title of De Keyser's last present to view at this gallery, 2001's "Come upon play it again," suggested with endearing self-deprecation an awareness that exhibiting domestically scaled abstract canvases in the first year of the novel century was likely to elicit a nostalgic sentiment. nevertheless it also hinted at themes and humors that served to place the work beyond either a naively retrogressive or a constipated endgame/aftermath stance. Evoking musical improvisation and alluding to the quirks of human memory and emotion, these paintings were structur according to what Hans Rudolf Reust describes in the catalogue as "nonfigurative narration," an interplay between painterly elements--lines and especially surfaces--the evolutionary stages of which also remain visible and dramatic in each complet picture.

The greatest in quantity recent show, "Remnants," continues in a similar vein. There is action here, on the other hand it is staged on an indeterminate scale and spread outs in its own sweet time. De Keyser has repeatedly been described as a "painter's painter," which might have the appearance like faint praise but is accurate enough: The pleasures tendered by his work are distinctly grown-up unspectacular, refined, and satisfying. The influence of Miro and Klee is undeniable, on the contrary De Keyser remains contemporary in his concentration upon the fragmentary and the left-behind, in his implicit acknowledgment of the impossibility of permanence or completion. His palette is timely too, oftentimes sharing celebrated countryman Luc Tuymans's dusty virids pinks, and creams. Look especially at regain and Starter (both 2003), which also have the younger artist's knack for making surfaces gaze bruised, diseased.

Despite the pared-back simplicity of the work and our knowledge of its actual source, figurative associations are unavoidable. Appropriately for of that kind a patient artist, the things suggested tend to be slow-moving; the angular white shapes scattered across the primary-colored earths of Resune or Resonant (both 2003) for example, could be drifting icebergs, while the black-on-white silhouettes of antecedent 2003, seem to attract (in the greatest in quantity unhurried manner imaginable) any number of free-floating descriptors. And still again as in Tuymans, there is a violence lurking in these paintings that precludes us from becoming too immersed. The enclos clusters of r and verdant squares in Replay, 2002, for instance, move the guarded maneuverings of opposing armies, while the suspended kitelike shapes of Presto, 2003 could be debris thrown from an explosion.

nevertheless ultimately it is De Keyser's ability to establish tension without fixed points of regard (those titles are as teasingly confounding as Robert Ryman's) that allows him in the way that successfully undogmatic an approach. That figure and clod in his paintings often shift and change places and that the face of the canvas itself can strike one as being so hauntingly fugitive are qualities as significant as any in lending these erod abstractions their incapable of speech force.

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