THE BELGIAN artist Raoul De Keyser, whose watercolours are on view at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, last showed in Ireland at the RHA, in 2000. That survey exhibition of his oil paintings made clear the long-term, strategic nature of his art, and confirmed the significance of his role in the emergence of a new kind of painting.
His younger and probably better known compatriot, Luc Tuymans, had already acknowledged his influence. As with Tuymans’s work, De Keyser’s paintings are usually quite small in scale, oblique in their approach to their subject matter, and subdued in mood.
De Keyser was born in Deinze, near Ghent, in 1930. In the 1960s, he was associated with New Vision, a group of artists interested in exploring contemporary possibilities for representational painting.
While they shared that concern with the Pop Art movement De Keyser, for one, could not be described as a Pop artist. Rather, he took a considered approach to combining aspects of the European tradition of abstract painting, more recent American developments, and the business of representation. In a sense he took as a starting point the idea that painting could combine abstraction and representation seamlessly, without fretting about whether it should be identified as predominantly one or the other.
While his reputation flourished within Belgium, where he influenced younger, emerging artists, and though he was highly regarded within a certain circle of painters internationally, he really remained little known outside his own country until the beginning of the 1990s, when he was over 60 years of age. At that point he began to attract much more attention, not because he was doing anything differently – one of the features of his work is its apparent lack of linear development — but because the art world had come around to his way of thinking and seeing.
Temperamentally, he is the opposite of the Neo-Expressionists who rose to prominence in the early 1980s. They made huge, assertive, heroic, often strident statements. Put his work next to theirs and you might not even notice it, but in terms of influence it has proved to be more compelling in the long run. Although all the watercolours in the Douglas Hyde show were made since the turn of the century, they perfectly encapsulate the qualities that defined what he was doing as far back as the early 1970s.
One series he made, entitled Remnants, literally recycled fragments of his own abandoned paintings and incorporated them as relics in new pieces. There are echoes of them in several of the watercolours.
Similarly, the straggly remains of a lino block that has been mostly cut away provide the basis for another series. The alternation of such chance, random marks and given structures is integral to De Keyser’s method. During the 1970s the white lines marking out a local soccer pitch became a pictorial template.
The tools and accoutrements of the studio also turn up as motifs, as does a monkey puzzle tree visible from his window, and the horizontal slats of the blinds on the window. The landscape is often evoked, sometimes quite definitely, sometimes much more ambiguously, as with several minimal, drained-looking watercolours which, despite hardly being there, so to speak, are visually arresting. In fact, for all its quietness and indirectness, his work is consistently arresting.
De Keyser, you could say, works from a position of judicious doubt. Not that he doubts what he is doing but, rather than asserting anything in the grand, Neo-Expressionist manner, he is continually drawing back from making such assertions. He questions things, and his paintings engage with hesitation and vulnerability. Rather than describing a brave new world in the modernist vein, they deal with the traces and residues of a faded old world, a wounded world. It’s a mood that informs a substantial body of recent and current painting.
The accompanying show, an installation by Joseph Grigely in Gallery 2, inspired by and about his experience of fly-fishing, complements the De Keyser very well. It’s best not to describe it, since the element of surprise adds greatly to its impact in context, but it’s not giving too much away to say that it’s as maximal as the installation in the main gallery space is minimal.
KEN REGAN'S You Can Nail Me Like Rolling Thunderat Gallery Number One features an extensive collection of photographs from Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revuefrom 1975, "a rag-tag variety show" that visited 22 cities and included Joni Mitchell, Allen Ginsberg, Joan Baez, Sam Shepard and Regan as official tour photographer. Shepard's fragmentary text and Regan's photographs were published as The Rolling Thunder Logbook. The photographs, together with a few much more recent, striking portraits of Dylan, make a fine exhibition.
Regan was already a seasoned sports and news photographer by the time Dylan enlisted him for the tour and, perhaps surprisingly, they've remained on good terms since. Regan has taken many iconic photographs of the singer, including the sleeve shot used on Desire.
The 60 or so images in the show include skilled, punchy reportage, on stage and back stage, and out in the wider
world, and many thoughtful portraits. There are fascinating studies of Dylan with Mitchell, Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Bruce Springsteen and others, and an intriguing record of the complex body language that marked Dylan’s attendance at Mick Jagger’s birthday party. For Dylan fans, and anyone with an interest in the music and the era, it’s a must.
Raoul De Keyser Watercoloursand Joseph Grigely, The Paradise(32). Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College. Until June 20.
You Can Nail Me Like Rolling Thunder. Ken Regan's photographs of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Tour in 1975. Gallery Number One, 1 Castle St. Until June 26.
