March 2025
Raoul De Keyser
Detail, Kalklijn en twee groenen, 1970-1971, oil on canvas, 59 x 47 1/4 inches, © Raoul De Keyser/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Belgium, courtesy Family Raoul De Keyser and David Zwirner
Helen Molesworth on Raoul De Keyser and curating Touch Game, a major new exhibition of the artist’s work at David Zwirner in New York.
Interview by Dan Golden
Dan Golden: Congratulations on the new De Keyser exhibition! I’d love to start by getting a brief Curator’s introduction to Raoul De Keyser.
Helen Molesworth: Well, Raoul De Keyser was a Belgian painter, born in 1930 in the small town of Deinze, and he spent his entire life there. He was raised and died in the same small Belgian town. De Keyser is a bit atypical as an artist in that he didn't go to art school until he was in his 30s. Before then, he worked as a sports writer for the local paper and was also a civil servant. He was an administrator at a large university. So this differs from the art careers one would typically think about in the postwar years.
For a long time, he was painting on the weekends and after hours. He had a reputation in Belgium—he showed, and people thought about him and considered him within the Belgian art world. But it really wasn’t until he retired from his civil service job in the mid-to-late 90s that he dedicated himself full-time to his art practice. Then, he was shown at Documenta 9 in 1992, and I think Zwirner picked him up around 2000/2001.
DG: The way he came into it is so interesting.
HM: Yeah, he has this very interesting trajectory. You know, he’s not a teacher in an art school, he doesn’t go to art school as a young person, he doesn’t tell his parents “I want to be an artist” when he’s six—it all comes later. It’s different, you know?
Come on, play it again nr. 2, 2001, oil on canvas, 51 1/4 x 74 7/8 inches, © Raoul De Keyser/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Belgium, courtesy Family Raoul De Keyser and David Zwirner
DG: What do you think drew De Keyser to abstraction? Why that mode, versus, say, figurative work or something else?
HM: Even though he’s from this small town in Belgium, he lives close to Amsterdam, and there are great museums there. There’s the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, and there’s S.M.A.K. in Ghent. And both museums in the ‘70s had very forward-looking, radically ambitious programs showcasing new American art. He’s seeing shows with Al Held, Robert Mangold, Mark Rothko.
So he’s aware of the move towards abstraction, of the rigorousness of abstraction—thinking about painting in very formal terms. He’s absorbing those American influences and then processing them in his own language and idiom. Again, he’s just kind of like this curious animal. He doesn’t travel much, but he’s going to museums in his locality and is very much in tune with the most radical art of his time.
DG: This reminds me of William Carlos Williams.
HM: Yes, it’s very much that model. He clearly wanted to be an artist and had to do it, but he’s doing it in a very different context.
DG: Do you know if he was part of an artistic community?
HM: I know that artists knew of De Keyser, loved him, and went to see him. I know that he had a very close relationship with some important European curators like Jan Hoet and Kasper König. But whether or not he was part of a local scene of artists, I can’t answer.
DG: Can you share anything about his studio and art practice?
HM: His studio was always in his house. For a long time, it was a room inside the house, and then at a certain point, they built a studio for him on an upper floor. Much of what he painted was what he saw outside his window—a soccer field, a tree, horizons. I wouldn’t call him a landscape painter, but there is an indebtedness to landscape in his work. Even his earliest paintings depicted everyday objects—door handles, socks—just closely observing the world around him.
Ochtend, 2000, oil and charcoal on canvas, 75 x 99 1/4 inches, © Raoul De Keyser/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Belgium, courtesy Family Raoul De Keyser and David Zwirner
DG: A lot of times, works can be so complex, so full of references. There is just this beauty in De Keyser’s work that’s so pure in that way. I’m curious, what was your first encounter with his work? How did you first come to know about him?
HM: It was in the early 2000s. I was working on Luc Tuymans’ first big American retrospective, and I was going to Belgium a lot to spend time with Luc in Antwerp. As part of my research, when I work with an artist on a monographic show, I want to know what artists influenced them. So I asked Luc who had influenced him, and he said, “Raoul De Keyser.” And I said, “I don’t know who that is.” So we went and looked at some De Keyser together, and that was it. My introduction to his work came through an artist.
DG: I love that—artist to artist. I can see the influence of De Keyser on Tuymans’ work now that you say that. Big time.
HM: Yes—absolutely.
DG: The treatment of the surface and the color... What was your impression when you first saw his work? What hit you at that time?
HM: Well, I loved it. I mean, I fell for it. I love abstract painting. And I also love projects that are inherently modest. De Keyser’s project is inherently modest, and I was very drawn to that. Initially, what I was most drawn to was De Keyser’s palette because I find it to be a very un-American palette. I can’t point to an American artist whose surfaces or whose use of color resemble his. That sort of bruised color—the purples, the blues, the muted tones. It comes from where he lives. It comes from the lowlands, the low, gray, cloudy sky, and the northern light. And I found all of that very moving.
DG: Totally. I see that. Speaking of those elements, the color, the forms, the structure—can you talk a bit about the significance of those elements in his work?
HM: De Keyser was interested in a few things. One is shape. Another is composition. And the third is paint application—what he’s doing with paint. Because he's interested in abstract painting, he’s always taking the world and reducing it to its formal elements. Like, I’m sitting at my kitchen counter right now, and there’s a way in which I could describe what I’m seeing—I could describe the pots hanging on the pegboard, or I could tell you that I’m looking at a grid of circles with circles on top of them. And I think De Keyser always saw things in terms of shape first. Once you start seeing things as shapes, you begin seeing the negative space between the shapes. And then, once you see that, you’re already dealing with composition. How are things arranged? De Keyser took that very seriously—the arrangement of shapes and negative space within the picture plane. And then, of course, as he got better and better as a painter, he played with color, building up color, wiping away color. He was always setting up a frame so that you could really see what was happening within the pictures.
DG: I love that. You talked about some artists he was looking at, such as Rothko, Mangold, and Held. Do you feel like there was one who was particularly influential?
HM: I don’t know that there was one in particular. What I see is more of the effect of the American challenge to European painting in the postwar years. De Keyser metabolized that challenge and those extensions of what painting could be. He sensed its radicality and then proceeded modestly to make his own suite of radical paintings.
“Initially, what I was most drawn to was De Keyser’s palette because I find it to be a very un-American palette… that sort of bruised color—the purples, the blues, the muted tones. It comes from where he lives, the lowlands, the low, gray, cloudy sky, and the northern light.”
Front, 1992, oil on canvas, 64 7/8 x 48 3/8 inches, © Raoul De Keyser/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Belgium, courtesy Family Raoul De Keyser and David Zwirner
Bleu de ciel, 1991-1992, oil on canvas, 27 3/8 x 19 3/4 inches, © Raoul De Keyser/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Belgium, courtesy Family Raoul De Keyser and David Zwirner
DG: That leads to my next question regarding scale. When I think of the American postwar movement, I think of big paintings, big gestures. However, De Keyser’s work generally tends to be smaller and more intimate. What would you say about the significance of scale in his work?
HM: I can’t speak to it from his perspective. Installing the show made it clear to me that one of the things that De Keyser does is foil the idea that a big painting is better than a small painting. Do you know what I mean? A big painting could be incredibly atmospheric, and a small painting could pack a punch. There are smaller paintings operating at the same visual, intellectual, and aesthetic level as larger ones. De Keyser inverts the usual hierarchy. He’s not a “bigger is better” guy. Bigger is just bigger.
I also think it comes from sports. If you think about a soccer field—it’s huge. At any point during the game, there’s an enormous amount of negative space, and what’s happening is often up close. De Keyser plays with the tension between big and small, negative and positive space, shape and color. I think that’s where the energy and attention in his paintings come from.
DG: That makes so much sense. His paintings are so powerful, working perfectly on a smaller scale.
Kalklijn en twee groenen, 1970-1971, oil on canvas, 59 x 47 1/4 inches, © Raoul De Keyser/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Belgium, courtesy Family Raoul De Keyser and David Zwirner
DG: Can you talk a little about your connection to David Zwirner and the origins of this exhibition?
HM: Well, I do the Dialogues podcast for David, and every once in a while, he asks me if I’d like to do a show. We were sitting down one time, throwing some ideas around and he mentioned they were thinking about doing a De Keyser show and I very casually said “I fucking love Raoul De Kayser!”
DG: Ha! I love that.
HM: So David asked if I would be interested in doing the De Keyser show, and I said, “Hell yes.” So that’s what happened.
DG: I love how it sounds so art-inider-y: “Do you know De Keyser?” “Yeah, I know De Keyser.”
HM: Totally. De Keyser is that kind of artist. He’s an artist’s artist. People who love painting, who know about abstraction, love De Keyser. It’s kind of culty in the best way.
DG: It seems that Zwirner has a natural gift for identifying unique artists like De Keyser.
HM: Yes. I think it’s one of the reasons he's so successful. David knows and loves painting. He’s got some of the best painters showing in his gallery: Marlene Dumas, Kerry James Marshall, Luc Tuymans, Chris Ofili… These are people invested in painting, big-time painters, capital ‘P’ painters — and De Keyser is absolutely a capital ‘P’ painter.
DG: If you had to boil it down, what do you think De Keyser was exploring in his work?
HM: I can’t speak for him, of course, but I see someone working through a set of problems. I don’t think he was painting himself into the museum or trying to write the next chapter of art history. He took his problem seriously: there’s the world, and then there’s the two-dimensional surface of a painting. Western oil painting has spent 600 years figuring out how to represent the world within the picture plane—sometimes through representation, sometimes through abstraction.
Once you reach abstraction, you deal with a new set of questions. For De Keyser, I think the relationship between painting and sports was key. Every game begins by marking the space where it will be played—the soccer field, basketball court, or tennis court. There are boundaries and rules: you can touch the ball, you can’t touch the ball. Within that framework, you push the limits, testing how far you can go.
If you look at De Keyser’s paintings, he makes a big deal about the edge. You might not see it online, but the canvas edges are often drawn out, painted over, and redrawn. Just like in sports, where the edge of the field matters—if your foot is over the line, it’s out. The rule is arbitrary, but it creates the structure for play. Painting is the same way.
DG: That makes a lot of sense. Once you find the game and love playing it, you just want to keep going, exploring all its possibilities.
HM: Exactly.
Untitled (Blurs), 1995, oil on canvas, 26 1/2 x 32 1/2 inches, © Raoul De Keyser/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Belgium, courtesy Family Raoul De Keyser and David Zwirner
“For De Keyser, I think the relationship between painting and sports was key. Every game begins by marking the space where it will be played…Within that framework, you push the limits, testing how far you can go.”
Installation View, Raoul De Keyser: Touch Game, David Zwirner, New York, January 16—March 14, 2025, , © Raoul De Keyser/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Belgium, courtesy Family Raoul De Keyser and David Zwirner
Installation View, Raoul De Keyser: Touch Game, David Zwirner, New York, January 16—March 14, 2025, , © Raoul De Keyser/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Belgium, courtesy Family Raoul De Keyser and David Zwirner
DG: I know it’s tough to pick just one, but if you had to name a painting—or a few—that feel especially emblematic of De Keyser’s work, which would you choose?
HM: That’s not how I think as a curator—I don’t play favorites. I’m not a collector; my job is to think about the work, talk about it, and present it in a way that opens it up for others.
DG: Fair enough! Then, let’s talk about your process. How did you go about curating this exhibition? What was your approach?
HM: Curating isn’t that complicated—you choose the strongest works and arrange them in a way that makes sense. My thinking here was that many people don’t know how to look at abstract painting anymore because representation is so dominant right now. So, I started with his early works, where you can see his initial concerns. Then, the show expands: some paintings have a horizon line, suggesting landscapes; others are clearly related to the soccer field, where the players become shapes and negative space. There are pieces where his paint handling is incredibly atmospheric, pushing color and texture to their limits.
I wanted the show to give a complete picture of his practice—so if someone had never seen a De Keyser before, they’d walk away with a solid sense of his work. He isn’t exhibited often in the U.S., so this was a rare opportunity. In the final room, we focused on his Come On, Play It Again series, highlighting how he kept playing with the same idea in different compositional arrangements.
DG: That’s fantastic. What do you think De Keyser’s legacy is? How has he influenced contemporary artists?
HM: Artists love his work. Even those who make sculptures or installations seem to get it. There’s something about his paintings that artists respond to intuitively.
I don’t love the word “pure,” especially in today’s context, but his work feels incredibly honest. He wasn’t painting for anyone’s approval or trying to build a legacy—he was just trying to capture the world as he saw it.
DG: That resonates. His paintings feel humble, direct—no gloss, no unnecessary embellishment.
HM: Exactly. And people pick up on that.
Installation View, Raoul De Keyser: Touch Game, David Zwirner, New York, January 16—March 14, 2025, , © Raoul De Keyser/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SABAM, Belgium, courtesy Family Raoul De Keyser and David Zwirner
DG: While curating this exhibition, did anything surprise you about his work? Did you come away with any new insights?
HM: One of the first things people notice is how varied his paintings are—they all look different. But after installing the show, physically moving the works around, I realized that underneath those differences, he was playing the same game over and over.
It’s like sports: you run drills, practice plays, so when the game comes, you’re prepared for the unexpected. De Keyser was doing the same—repeating and refining, so that every once in a while, he could paint something truly unexpected. I wouldn’t have seen that if I hadn’t worked so closely with the paintings.
DG: I also noticed the layering in his work—how underpainting peeks through unexpectedly. Is that a big part of his process?
HM: Absolutely, especially in his later work. Some pieces become incredibly atmospheric. There’s a large painting called Morning that, under normal light, looks like a diagram. But once it was placed under a skylight, the background—what seemed like a flat field—suddenly came alive with underpainting.
DG: That’s incredible. Before we wrap up, I’d love to learn more about your work. Looking at your career—your writing, curating—do you see a common thread in your approach?
HM: I love painting. I’ve spent a lot of time with painters, thinking about and studying the history of painting. I also believe that art isn’t just about things—it is a thing. Art generates and conveys knowledge, and I’ve always been interested in finding ways to open that up to a larger audience.
DG: That leads perfectly to my last question—can you tell me more about your podcast? What’s the focus, and what are you working on next?
HM: The podcast is about how artists think—what interests them and what ideas they want to explore. We try to take big ideas and make them accessible, something you can listen to while working in your studio.
Right now, there’s so much low-quality public discourse—it’s either dumbed-down or full of noise. I’m committed to making space for thoughtful, intelligent conversations so we can actually listen to each other without all the nonsense.
DG: More of that, please!
HM: Exactly.
DG: Thank you so much for this conversation—it has been a pleasure talking with you.
HM: Thank you! It was a pleasure.
Raoul De Keyser
Touch Game
David Zwirner
New York
January 16—March 14, 2025
Raoul De Keyser, 2009. Photo by Christophe Vander Eecken
Raoul De Keyser (1930–2012) is known for his sophisticated and tempered paintings that subtly and evocatively explore the relationship between color and form. Made up of simple shapes and painterly marks, his works allude to the natural world and representational imagery while avoiding suggestions of narrative or reductive frameworks that limit experience and interpretation.
De Keyser was born in Deinze, Belgium. His work has been represented by David Zwirner since 1999. Previous solo exhibitions of the artist’s work at the gallery’s New York location include Come on, play it again (2001); Remnants (2003); Recent Work (2006); Terminus: Drawings (1979-1982) and Recent Paintings (2009); Freedom (2011); and Drift (2016), which was first on view at David Zwirner, London. An exhibition of De Keyser’s work at the gallery’s Hong Kong location in 2021 marked the artist’s first solo presentation in Greater China, and David Zwirner, Hong Kong, presented Raoul De Keyser: Replay Again, in 2022. Raoul De Keyser: Touch Game, an expansive exhibition of the artist’s oeuvre curated by Helen Molesworth, is currently on view at the gallery’s 19th Street location in New York.
Helen Molesworth is a Los Angeles-based writer, curator, and podcaster known for her influential work in contemporary art. She has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Wexner Center for the Arts. In addition to her curatorial work, Molesworth hosts the Dialogues podcast and the video series PROGRAM for David Zwirner Gallery, engaging in conversations with artists and cultural figures. She also created and hosted Death of an Artist, a podcast exploring the life and tragic death of Ana Mendieta. Her contributions to the art world have earned her numerous accolades, including the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies Award for Curatorial Excellence (2011), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2021), and the Clark Art Writing Prize (2022).
Dan Golden is a Los Angeles-based artist, designer, and creative director whose work bridges fine art, product design, and graphic design. His collaborations with manufacturers such as Stephanie Odegard, Swarovski, and CB2 reflect his commitment to thoughtful, innovative design. He is also the founder of Curator.