The Belgian painter Raoul De Keyser was something of an enigma.
Self-taught, to a large extent, he was fascinated by both abstraction and figurative painting. Working in a way that seemed to question the nature of painting, he created works with imagery which was predicated on the banal and the everyday, yet seemed to push the boundaries of what was and wasn't art. Here he was delicate, there blunt; now simple, now complex. The paintings are engaging, indeterminate, intimate in a curious way, non-threatening and yet unnerving. One critic said De Keyser's work was characterised by "an almost child-like freshness of vision".
De Keyser's work, which was last seen in the UK a decade ago at a major retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, now comes to Scotland for the first time in this packed show. The abstract canvases with their deceptively simple mark-making will be lined up in dense clusters on the Inverleith Gallery's walls.
The exhibition itself has been organized with the help of De Keyser's son, Piet, who has allowed the gallery to show a number of works from his father's studio for the first time, including many made not long before the artist died. In one room will hang works painted just three years after De Keyser rediscovered his paintbrush in the 1960s. Elsewhere hangs his most recent work, created in the years before his death, aged 82, in 2012. The thread, over the intervening years, will wind its way across the remaining Inverleith walls.
Inspired by the natural world and his own surroundings, De Keyser saw it all through a prism of abstraction and intermittent figuration. Brought up in Deinze, East Flanders, he began painting as a teenager. He became an art/sports journalist before studying at the town's Academy of Fine Arts (1963-64) under the Belgium painter Roger Raveel, whose own interest in abstraction and figuration - propounded in the local 'New Vision' movement - was mirrored in De Keyser's early work.
But if De Keyser started out painting the familiar everyday tropes of the New Vision-ists - door handles, garden hoses, tents - he broadened his own spectrum from there on in, from football pitches to parakeets. These were the sights of Deinze, all abstracted with a light touch.
"De Keyser had this ability to paint what he felt in a completely original way and using the most economical of means," says Paul Nesbitt, curator at Inverleith, who considers De Keyser "one of the great painters of the last half century."
De Keyser's art was often the art of what was seen through his studio window, from the much-painted monkey puzzle outside it to the blind in front of it. Dots, squares, lines and outlines - the meaning of it all is somewhat obscure and wilfully so. Canvases such as 2008's Company, with its red architectural shapes and black blobs, have the air of a quasi-diagrammatical précis of some unspecified incident - but that is the mind's construct. "It is the same and it is not," said De Keyser once, when asked whether the white lines in his 'football pitch' paintings were indeed white lines on a football pitch.
De Keyser's big break internationally came in 1992 when he was invited to show at Documenta IX in Kassel, Germany, which brought him wider recognition and major exhibitions in galleries from White Cube in London to David Zwirmer in New York.
Perhaps predictably, given the nature of his work, critical reception polarised, during his lifetime, into two camps - those who thought he was engaged in some kind of artistic miracle work, and those with lingering doubts over his skill. That latter opinion might, of course, have had something to do with his self-taught status, of his painting without the institutional rubber-stamping of art school.
"His subjects are not exotic or necessarily remarkable, but then everyday life is like that," says Nesbitt. "Great art has the ability to activate our senses. Once you've seen a painting by Raoul De Keyser it is possible to experience a familiar world in a different way, and that's a rare and wonderful thing."
Raoul de Keyser: Inverleith Gallery, Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh (0131 248 2971/2849 at weekends, www.rbge.org.uk), February 14-April 12, Tue-Sat, 10am-4.30pm (5.30pm from March onwards)
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