Roger Raveel: Imagine the abstraction

Some painters seem to have existed only to fill the pages of our art magazines of the 2020s. Like Roger Raveel, to whom L'Œil devotes a fine article under the title "Who is Roger Raveel? We ask ourselves. We answer...

A Belgian painter who is 'world famous... in Flanders'. This is how the magazine presents Roger Raveel. Is this Raveel a European genius from the 1950s and 1970s who was ignored because he was crushed, like so many others, by American abstract expressionism and Pop art? It would be an attempt to rehabilitate him then to present him to us today. Thank you L'Œil for us and for him. But is Roger Raveel really great? Was he great when he reached the peak of his art? There's something to it, that's for sure. And the Eye points this out.

Many painters of that time were torn by the opposing temptations of the figurative and the abstract. So was Raveel. He solved the problem by making the two coexist in his paintings. Or rather, by maintaining an abstract composition when he returned to the figurative. It is true that, seen from a distance, a painting is initially an abstract assembly of patches of colour before the gradual appearance of its motifs makes it a figurative work when approached. But are we as brilliant as Vinci if we make this discovery? Is it sufficiently important for one to base one's artistic approach on it?

Ah, there are also these necessarily "Malevitchian" squares of colour sprinkled from canvas to canvas like an embryonic trademark. Good. Nice but not enough to dethrone the stars of the sixties. Raveel obviously didn't have the fire for it. He knew it. When he discovered Rauschenberg, he didn't hesitate to add objects to his paintings. Perhaps he would have been better off continuing to move his little squares between figurative and pixelated motifs?

Warhol was initially doing Lichtenstein without knowing it. When he discovered his giant comic book squares on canvas, he looked elsewhere for ways to do Warhol. And crush European modern art with his Pop art.

Photo: Roger Raveel, Man, bucket, etc., 1967, private collection

Raveel - MDM

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