A drama lives within each painting by Raoul De Keyser. Even the sparsest works are entire galaxies buzzing with activity. Yet, as curator Helen Molesworth writes of Touch Game, the late artist’s current show at David Zwirner Gallery, De Keyser “deliciously halts the human impulse to make meaning.”
He may not always halt the impulse, but De Keyser’s paintings are fascinatingly inscrutable abstractions, with none of the compositional logic that grounds, say, an AbEx painting. Instead, he alludes to an inner logic that enlivens their quivering lines, floating orbs and squares, irregular shapes, and even their watery washes of color. In “Blue Note” (2006), an azure ground covers most of the modestly sized canvas, its visible brushstrokes both indicating the artist’s hand and evoking waves underscored by a few small dots and shapes and one large white form near the bottom that could be a landmass. The composition is so off-kilter, with the white form almost touching the bottom edge of the canvas and the center pure blue, that the dissonance between the painting’s materiality and its image can’t really be the point. It’s the awkwardness that stands out, discouraging potential readings just as it beckons them.