Raoul De Keyser: 1980-1999

by Steven Jacobs, Raoul De Keyser, Dirk De Vos

Raoul De Keyser's mainly abstract art is remarkable for its dimensional realism--that is, its connection of the subjective and objective dimensions of experience. De Keyser personalizes abstraction, he gives it a human face; many of his pictures include motifs drawn from his immediate surroundings or his own personal experience. Instead of searching for an overarching formal principle--as did the pioneers of abstraction from Kandinsky's time through the 1960s--De Keyser attunes his art to the significance of improvisation and chance in all life, and contemporary life in particular. Thus we find in the art of Raoul De Keyser much of the contingency, inconsistency, textual precariousness, modal variety, particularity, unpredictability, disorder and flux that we find in our daily lives. This catalogue, published on the occasion of a touring exhibition of De Keyser's work, documents in sumptuous reproductions the artist's oeuvre over the past twenty years.

272 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Steven Jacobs is an art historian specializing in the relationship between film and the visual arts. His research also focuses on the representation of architecture, the city and landscape in film and photography, as well as on themes in Belgian modern art history, including the work of Raoul De Keyser.
He has published internationally in journals such as Art Journal, October, History of Photography, The Journal of Architecture, Millennium Film Journal and De Witte Raaf. His books include Raoul De Keyser: Retour 1964–2006 (2007), The Wrong House: The Architecture of Alfred Hitchcock (2007), Framing Pictures: Film and the Visual Arts (2011), Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema (2017) and Art in the Cinema: The Mid-Century Art Documentary (2020).
Alongside his academic work, Jacobs has curated exhibitions for institutions including SMAK Ghent and Museum Arnhem, and has programmed films for KASK-Cinema, Cinema Zuid and Cinematek Brussels. He teaches modern art at Ghent University and film history at the University of Antwerp.