April 24, 2004
April 23, 2004
David Reed on painting and emotion
David Reed in conversation with Katy Siegel, October 2001
(from Making Waves: The Legacy of Lee Lozano)
KS: How can painting be emotional without being expressionist?DR: It's one of the strengths of painting that you aren't coerced into having emotions; you decide to have them. It's not like film. I get weepy at some of the most embarrassing movies. I can even get patriotic, and I'm ashamed of myself. But some of those patriotic emotions come from having a sense of community with other people. You can have those kinds of feelings looking at a painting, too, but in a way that's not coerced: You can choose to have them.
Raoul De Keyser at Whitechapel, London
Raoul De Keyser
Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
Through May 23
Raoul De Keyser bloomed late in Belgium, beginning an astonishing forty-year career at the age of thirty-five. The curators have put together fifty paintings from the early '70s forward, mixing older works among recent ones. The largely abstract canvases often begin with a simple, domestic image overlaid with gesture, monochrome, or a grid. For De Keyser, who explores painting's expanse rather than cataloguing its finite categories, nothing is inevitable, and many things seem possible?a state of affairs that feels right, right now.
Katy Siegel