Kalklijn (Chalk Line)

Kalklijn is a monumental work featuring a sharp, white right angle cutting through the centre of a green field with a distant horizon demarcated by a blue strip against a white ground. It is one of a large series of paintings Raoul De Keyser painted of chalk lines on soccer fields in the 1970s, taking direct inspiration from the soccer fields situated nearby his hometown of Deinze, East Flanders.
After a brief stint in painting in his early years, De Keyser went on to become a sports journalist for a short period before once again returning to the canvas. He situated himself as a representative of the Nieuwe Visie (New Vision), a small movement exclusive to East Flanders and led first and foremost by Roger Raveel. Proponents of the New Vision aimed to ‘revalue everyday reality’: a subdued, more abstract-oriented counterpart to the American Pop movement. The goals of the movement were well-suited to the surroundings of the artists themselves: De Keyser was born and raised in Deinze, where Roger Raveel also taught at the local art academy. The town is a quiet one seated on the Lys River and provided De Keyser with inspiration for most of his fifty-year long career as a painter.
Prior to his discovery of chalk lines on soccer fields, De Keyser spent the 1960s drawing door handles, garden hoses, and other day-to-day items. These paintings lived and breathed the spirit of the New Vision movement, but his later interest in lines drawn in nature elevated his work to a higher and more intimate level of the investigation of everyday objects, in which the focus revolved around abstract notions of colour, space, and form, transforming day-to-day items into aesthetic motifs.
The result is a largely reposed oeuvre, with De Keyser’s chalk line paintings serving as prime examples of the artist’s style, and perhaps even taking inspiration from his time covering sports news before venturing into painting. His study of quotidian materials, such as canvases or chalk lines hand drawn onto grassy fields, also belays a Greenbergian interest in the act of painting itself. In the current work, the chalk line enters the centre of the canvas at an angle, and extends towards the horizon to suggest depth, while the green backdrop on which it rests is entirely flat, emphasising the chalkline even further. De Keyser possessed a sizeable collection of photographs he had taken himself of chalk lines, which he would use during the creative process to determine how to distribute the various aspects and surfaces of the composition, and decide on the best viewing angle. By balancing his artwork just between abstraction and New Vision realism, De Keyser guides the viewer nonchalantly through his own painting process and aesthetic interests.
Roger and Hilda Matthys-Colle purchased the current work directly from the artist in 1971, one year after the painting’s completion. Although the piece would go on to enjoy three important exhibitions over the next ten years, De Keyser himself wouldn’t achieve his international breakthrough until 1992, when he participated in the Documenta IX show in Kassel, Germany, which gave him widespread acclaim across the US and Europe. Ten years later, he was given monumental shows at White Cube and the Whitechapel in London. Roger and Hilda Matthys-Colle’s selection of De Keyser’s work for their collection was, as were most all of their acquisitions, a prescient choice, recognising the qualities that set De Keyser apart as a unique Belgian artist. The very words that Joost Declerq, director of the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens, used to describe the Matthys-Colle Collection as a whole, could very well be used to describe Kalklijn: deliberate and serene.