07 September 2007 - 21 October 2007

“Why paint?”

“Well, why not paint?” (from a dream)

Robert De Keersmaecker is a painter who views the world with a painterly understanding and photographic eye. What at first glance appear to be documentary images of building facades and shop windows are, in reality, careful constructions, built up from a deep experience of looking and patiently painting and repainting. Many of his recent works literally contain a constructed inside or outside, which for the viewer remain invisible.

In his travels he sees wonderful things: yellow-painted sides of facades, crooked post boxes, loose-hanging wires, prohibiting signs. These are added to a collection of various images he has assembled over the years. His interest in trivial details testifying to the wittiness of property owners are stored in thousands of photos. Later, he analyzes these pictures further, zooming in on them in search of yet more details. His works derive, on the one hand, from a fascination for everything that’s crooked, has false perspective, is forbidden, absurd and ludicrous, and, on the other hand, from a love of paint, color and material. Sawed-open, sealed, slant-cut boxes; painted scenes, layer piled upon layer of paint. These lovingly saturated works are simultaneously precise and nonchalant, studied and naïve, humorous and serious.

They are at once inside and outside.

Perhaps there is a key to their meaning, since the work of Robert De keersmaecker doesn’t allow for either thematically unambiguous or painterly functional narrowness. The meaning of this work is both revealed and concealed within the paint. The surface of his paintings hides, just like a shop window reflection, more than it shows.

Ria Van Landeghem, juli 2007