“Gentle fights” is how the architect Paul Robreccht described the working methods of his friend, the late Belgian painter Raoul de Keyser, who is the subject of a stirring exhibition on view at David Zwirner in New York through April 23. It’s an inspiring image, and one that jibes with de Keyser’s practice overall: a model of quaint, romantic workmanship, full of intense, highly personal experimentation. Living and working in the small town of Deinze, Belgium, he toiled at canvases large and small, often taking mundane sights in his immediate surroundings for inspiration. As the show’s curator Ulrich Loock joked during a walk-through, “The radius of his search for motifs was maybe 100 meters around his house.” Those motifs included things within the studio (a staircase, a gate, window-sill clasps) as well as in the town: trees glimpsed through the window, or the geometry of the local soccer field. Because of this relationship to objects actually observed, Loock has proposed a way of looking at de Keyser’s work that, he said, “does not enter the discourse between abstraction and figuration.” These paintings are “almost always referential,” he said — even if the reference in question is to the picture plane, or to a previous painting of his own that the artist has chosen to recall.Loock’s selection of work ranges from the early ’80s through 2012 — de Keyser died in October of that year, and a cluster of small paintings he made in the months before his passing are installed here, exactly as they hung in the artist’s studio. They’re funky little D.I.Y. oddities, slapdash and strange, ranging from a small wood panel punctured with staples to what appears to be a miniature riff on Barnett Newman. This show also includes two canvases that hung at Documenta 9, in 1992, both of them sharing a washed-out bloody tint that brings to mind stained medical gauze or fabric. But even with these works, the atmosphere is one of floating, contemplative beauty; de Keyser might disrupt the surface of an almost-monochrome, as he does in 1990’s “Z” — the title surely a joke about Zorro wielding a palette knife — but the end result remains even-keeled and fairly serene. (There’s one outlier in this show that isn’t afraid to be outwardly ugly: “Closerie I (Berliner Ensemble),” 1998, lays ragged lines of scabby red over a white ground that’s marred with passages of pigment resembling the yellowed teeth of a heavy smoker.) In discussing one of the Documenta 9 works — “Front,” 1992 — Loock stressed what he termed de Keyser’s “lightness,” and how his manner of painting was refreshingly “irresponsible — there were no obligations that have to be met, no demands that he acknowledged or felt like he needed to deal with.” Part of this lightness entailed a swiftness during the actual process of making. “Front,” Loock surmised, was probably dashed off “in less than half an hour,” though de Keyser would generally let a partially finished canvas stew in the studio for a period of time before returning to it for extra amendments. (“The act of painting was fast,” he concluded. “But finishing could take a long time.”) Naysayers might scoff — 30 minutes, for a work to hang at Documenta! — but de Keyser’s facility with color sets him apart from other practitioners of so-called provisional painting. These canvases don’t always represent well in photographs, partly because of the way buried zones of pigment can gleam and peak through what has been laid atop them. De Keyser, Loock noted, was known for painting over, and over, and over compositions, so that a finished work — like “Dalton,” 1990 — might end up as four blue circles poking through an opaque scrim of tan.While it might just be personal preference, this show does make clear that de Keyser excelled in small to medium formats, and when he stayed as far away from recognizable shapes or forms as possible. It’s not a hard and fast rule — “Bern-Berlin hangend,” 1993, is a great painting that is obvious in its representation of tree branches; “Detail,” 2005, an almost traditional landscape based on a photograph de Keyser took himself, is one of the most intriguing works in the exhibition. But a trio of large-scale paintings — “Come on, play it again, nr.4,” and “nr.2,” both 2001, and “Siesta,” 2000 — lack the same quirky joy as the more modestly sized works. Those three paintings — with cellular Brice Mardenish blobs, or washy, lozenge-shaped pods of color, or a waterfall of cascading ovals — don’t seem to take the same risks.Thankfully, everything else here is about risk, rewarded. I’ll admit to being mildly in love with these paintings, and also with the quasi-mythical persona of de Keyser himself, who comes across as more of a diligent, contemplative tinkerer than an heir to the tradition of grandly gestural and self-satisfied male abstract painters. “At a certain point, he’d stop working on the painting, place it on the floor, facing toward the wall,” recalls the artist’s grandson Niels de Keyser in a catalog essay for the show. “Two weeks later he’d turn it back around and continue. He’d add a dot or maybe a line. Afterwards he watched his paintings for a long time. Sitting with a bit of music and just looking at the paintings that were hanging there. He did that a lot.”
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