Radiating negativity
Andrew Lambirth
Raoul de Keyser; Edge of the Real Whitechapel Art Gallery, until 23 May
Why did Raoul de Keyser (born 1930) give up his first career as an art writer and sports columnist to become an artist? What supreme folly possessed him? But perhaps it's not too late to revert. Surely some newspaper magnate could be persuaded to give him a sinecure on a provincial weekly so that he could retire from a profession that he evidently entered by mistake. It's the only honourable solution, since for the past 40 years de Keyser has been producing pictures of such limited interest that even he must be bored to death with them, It would be an act of charity to release him from so burdensome a position.
Thankfully, his work is not particularly well known in the UK. This is the first major survey of his painting career in this country, and comprises 75 works. On the day I visited, attendance was sporadic at the Whitechapel — not helped perhaps by the fine spring weather and the fact that the top-lit galleries were, in places, blindingly bright with sunlight, making it difficult to focus on anything on the white walls. Visitors seemed glum and inattentive. The most fun was had by two elderly ladies carrying folding chairs which they carefully placed in front of the pictures. Comfortably seated, they speculated widely as to the subjects depicted. In these scarcely adumbrated canvases they saw whales at sea, ghosts, lions or possibly a map, trees or maybe creeping deforestation. Their interpretations were far more imaginative than anything else in the gallery.
For an essential negativity radiates from de Keyser's pictures — a denial of everything that makes painting so special: colour, composition, drawing, variation of
touch and surface, all organised into a whole which tells us something new about the perceptual world. There is no hidden structure to this work, no inner necessity, no apparent reason to be. De Keyser's work is so marginal as to be off the page and out of the picture. There is very little to look at in his paintings, but he is neither properly a Minimalist nor a Pop artist, though his name is spuriously linked with both movements. Occasionally, he makes a good-ish beginning, as in the apricot-pink ground of 'Tors' [Torso], but nothing more is built upon it. The work is stalled.
Yet according to a brood of international museum directors writing in the catalogue, de Keyser is hard at work interrogating the very nature of painting. How to account for the high standing of his work? Perhaps because it reproduces well, and can even look quite impressive when only a detail is shown. But to visit a whole show of his paintings is to be confronted with a body of work that is admittedly modest in scale but utterly nugatory in meaning and relevance. It's a good thing this exhibition is free — I can't imagine anyone happily paying to see it.
To accompany the de Keyser exhibition and taking up two thirds of the upstairs gallery space is Edge of the Real — A Painting Show. Featuring 20 'established or emerging artists', it is intended to complement the Belgian 'master' and strike echoes from his work. (As easy to raise a resonance from cotton wool.) Thankfully, there is actually very little connection between these young-ish But artists and de Keyser, though the common theme is supposed to be images that 'hover between reality and abstraction'. Well, so does most art, so no bulls-eve there.
With the spirits so lowered by the dreary pseudo-art colonising the rest of the Whitechapel, it is difficult to be enthusiastic about this oddly assorted bunch of artists, each represented by a single work — unless they cheat by doing multi-panel pieces. The highly talented George Shaw seems to have painted himself into a dim corner of the churchyard — perhaps it's time he went back and had another long look at the Pre-Raphaelites. David Thorpe contributes a rather mad and wispily intricate collage called 'Good People'. Andrew Grassie's work represents a triumph of technique over content, as he plugs away at his miniature photo-realist tempera paintings of sad interiors. Michael Raedecker shows off considerable stitchcry skills but little else, while the elegant and fastidious drippings of Callum Innes look quite out of place in such sportive company. How else can one consider the hideous palette of Victoria Morton? The most effective piece is an inventive and immaculate collage entitled 'Core's Progress' by Ian Monroe. The Whitechapel used to put on such exciting and worthwhile shows — I hope it soon returns to form.
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