Wako Works of Art is pleased to present a new exhibition by Raoul De Keyser. Entitled Return, it marks the third gallery show with the artist, and the first exhibition held posthumously after the artist’s passing in October 2012 at the age of 82.

Curated by Martin Germann, Raoul De Keyser: Return centers on fifteen small-scale paintings the artist completed over the spring and summer of 2012, just before his death. These works return to major themes that defined his nearly fifty-year career: the flat landscapes of the Belgian lowlands close to the sea, where he spent his entire life; everyday objects close at hand; the division of the canvas itself; but also further questions around color, brushstroke, and gesture. First shown together in 2015 in London, parts of this group, will be presented alongside a small selection of earlier paintings.

De Keyser’s quiet paintings exist between, and beyond, abstraction and representation. Built from simple shapes and marks, they suggest space and form without telling a specific story. Their spare vocabulary creates unexpected visual intensity, moments of deep touch that rewards slow looking. Each painting explores what painting can do, while transcending the physical materials to become something greater. Though they appear simple, his works emerged from long periods of careful development. Over his whole career from the 1960s to the 2010s, the artist’s work mirrored many temporal movements by remaining true to his own painterly language.

As the artist’s last deliberately and meticulously planned series, the exhibited works are part of a source code to the artist’s life-long oeuvre, created at a moment in time when physical energy left him. A simple vertical line, a seascape, things in his immediate surroundings as a painter – or an elderly man – but especially the focus on the painting as an object becomes as visible as it is tangible, along with an intensification of the subtle and mischievous humour which characterized his whole work. The muted elegance of these fifteen canvasses matches with their material fragility, which marks another step navigating the threshold of beauty and collapse. Some of the objects are equipped with oddly crooked hooks, peculiarly overfolded canvases, or stand away from the wall to emphasize gravity, or painted on the back of box for wine. Every piece reads like a compact short story on its own, in which De Keyser one final time resumes over what he could accomplish in art and life.

The exhibition’s title, Return, describes Raoul De Keyser’s general artistic project: over his whole career he constantly returned to subjects from earlier times to modify them in the present. At the same time, it refers to earlier titles the artist has used over his life, such as Replay, Retour, and other terms describing that the way how we look into the future is always connected to our past. One of his most famous quotes reads: “A return is a journey, too.” In one stage of its development the artist entitled the group with “Tokyo Wall”, which gives it’s partial presentation in Japan a special meaning. Its partial presentation goes alongside few examples of earlier works from the beginning of the 2000s, to provide context of De Keyser’s life-long exploration of grey zones between abstraction, figuration, and painterly object. 

Curator: Martin Germann
Martin Germann lives and works as a curator, dividing his time between Belgium, Germany, and Japan. He served as adjunct curator at Mori Art Museum in Tokyo until 2025, and from 2012 to 2019, he headed the artistic department of S.M.A.K., the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, Belgium. Earlier in his career, he was a curator at the Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover (2008–2012) and worked on the 3rd and 4th Berlin Biennale (2003–2006). He received an AICA award for best exhibition in Belgium in 2016 for Lili Dujourie: Folds in Time. In 2018, he curated Raoul De Keyser’s retrospective exhibition oeuvre at S.M.A.K., which travelled to Pinakothek der Moderne (Munich, Germany) in 2019.