BRUSSELS.- In 2021 Roger Raveel would have celebrated his 100th birthday. In this centenary year BOZAR is paying extensive homage to Raveel with a very comprehensive overview of his work. With more than 150 works (paintings, drawings, graphics and objects) from public and private collections the public will be able to (re)discover one of Belgium’s most important post-war artists.

As curator Franz Wilhelm Kaiser aptly puts it, Raveel (1921-2013) was a fiercely individualistic artist. He was radically different to his contemporaries in the way he developed his very own visual language that achieved a balance between the figurative and the abstract.

At a time when the art world was becoming increasingly international, he also made the conscious decision to remain in the village of his birth, Machelen-aan-de-Leie, and to draw his inspiration from the local: his family, his house and his immediate surroundings at the heart of the Leie Region.

During an artistic career that spanned nearly six decades Roger Raveel (1921-2013) was active across a range of disciplines, including drawing, painting, graphics, in situ installations and happenings.

A work by Raveel is immediately recognisable. His characteristic visual language began to take shape in 1948 and was distinctive for its strong contour lines, absence of detail, mix of figurative and abstract elements and vital, intense colours. Recurrent elements of his signature style are striped characters, carts, squares, mirrors and concrete posts. From the early 1960s Raveel’s art is typified by his attempts to break down the barriers between the work of art and its environment: he wants his works to flow out into the surrounding space, integrating objects in his paintings such as mirrors, a bicycle wheel or even a cage containing a live parakeet. He also produced a number of large in situ installations that can still be admired today, such as the large wall paintings at Beervelde Castle (1966) or in the Brussels metro station Merode (1975). His artistic style has certain affinities with the art movements known internationally by names such as Nieuwe Figuratie or Nouvelle Figuration. Yet Raveel himself belonged to an earlier generation and as such can be seen as a precursor. This is no doubt why the poet Roland Jooris coined the term De Nieuwe Visie (The New Vision) in relation to Raveel’s art and what it represented.

This retrospective focuses on the radical particularity of Raveel’s work and seeks to provide a comprehensive view of his varied artistic production. As his work is not marked by any linear development, the exhibition is structured around ten thematic sections. Throughout his career, in different combinations and through different media, it was to these themes that the artist constantly returned, namely Self-portrait, Without Identity, Interior and Exterior (Table and Garden), Striped, Modernity in the Countryside, Closer to Nature, The Square, Combines, The Cart and Monumental Statements. Together these give the visitor an insight into Raveel’s overall subject: people faced with their everyday concerns and as a universal concept. Highlighting the universal in the everyday effectively summarises Raveel’s artistic aspiration.

Raveel was active at a time when the art world was rapidly becoming international. Yet he made the conscious decision to remain in the village where he was born. He painted the scenes he witnessed in everyday life: domestic scenes (he lived with his wife Zulma and his father and they often appear in his paintings), the garden behind the house, the football pitch, concrete fence posts, a bicycle, etc. Raveel was not seeking the idyllic or a romanticised version of a simple life in the countryside. It was the very ordinariness of everyday life in Machelen that he loved, in which he saw a certain authenticity. Today, in an age of global art, Raveel’s choice to make his immediate surroundings the principal source of inspiration – when he was perfectly aware of what was happening elsewhere – appears revolutionary or even prophetic.