Roger Raveel

"Hugo, [Claus] Now you should see my recent works. A drawing in ink, three pencil drawings and two sketches in oil-paint: a still-life and a landscape in the strongest colors you can imagine. I still have to work on the landscape, but I really think it will be the best of my paintings till now.. ..but the happiest thing is, I have acquired much more freedom."

"Every day I make more progress in technique: understanding of color, the material and the line. [I] can even give better theoretical explanations. And moreover, gradually I live more and more connected with the matter of the profession. What I mean is that my thinking and feeling are more directly, more fundamentally connected with painting itself. No longer so much thinking and feeling get lost."

"[I have] all respect for that neoclassicism [of Piet Mondrian ], but it would sacrifices me too much to architecture. That kind of art does indeed fit perfectly in very modern rooms of modern buildings in equally modern cities, but never again a handcart can drive in there and never again someone can speak or think of a white dog cart in the fog. I am longing for a painting that can hang in a modern environment and still have its 'personal' life."

"- As far as my exhibition concerned [opening was 8 May 1954, in Ghent].. ..there is however a recent and important painting hanging there 'Man met Boompje' [Man with tree, later titled 'The Gardener] - permettez-moi - with beautiful refracting matters and color: lemon-yellow spots and lacquerish black on white, (face) transparent pure light-blue with a very thin layer glacis over it (in the small wall) and strong-blue painted vertical line. Yellow brown and mauve brush-sweeps with small red dashes over it (for the small tree), and further a lot of beautiful white."

"The city offers certainly advantages, I agree. But I think that they do not outweigh the direct, unadulterated inspiration of the natural life that I find here [in the country, in Machelen]."

"The terrible beautiful Life."

"That I started [in the creation of his art] from my immediate environment was extremely important to me. Only the things I knew, with which I was familiar, which I had caught on their reality value, I could approach free of extra-pictorial aesthetics and pale romanticism. Of course the question remained how I - who wanted to involve modern life in my art - could continue to seek my inspiration at Machelen-aan-de-Leie, a village in the countryside, far from the city and the crowds. Where can one sense better the infiltration of modern life than in a village in the countryside? In the city everything gets integrated immediately, you can't see clearly the insulating and contrasting-alienating effect of publicity, the gas-station, the concrete, the car, etc. On the other hand, I keep saying that we must continue to see the grass, the corn and the cows. Not within an animistic unity, but from a mentality that has the courage to approach these things freely and ruthless in our era. What ordinary people make out of life is fascinating me."

"I don't want to be a preacher who tries to improve the world according to his own opinion. For that I put too much in perspective in my thinking and perhaps I am more independent. I do not start from a reflex on tradition and on social and political structures but rather from a continual and fresh scanning for the essence of things."

"The cosmic also keeps me busy, more than the other 'Nieuwe Vizie' ['New Vison'-artists]. For me it means the feeling of forces in nature like electricity, radio, radar, and of forces that one only suspects, and has not been able yet to track down scientifically."

"The square is spiritually charged. It is the product of mankind, it is not copied from nature like the circle."

"Raveel's goal is that because of an intruding neutral plane in the painting the attentive spectator will project himself into that plane and thus he becomes a part of the artwork. This relationship is of course simpler and more evident when the viewer sees himself in a mirror than by identifying himself with the painting by means of a monochrome plane. But the result is still the same: the creation of a unity between artwork and audience. That's Raveel's first goal. His second goal - equally important and in later art-works often coinciding with the first one - is that the painting must be able to flow out [its own borders/frame] into its surroundings and it must even be able to affect this environment. In other words: reality must become a part of the artwork."

"Around 1950 Raveel started to question the usual role of the spectator by actively involving him in the final realization of his paintings. He realized this by keeping empty certain parts in the painting – creating only abstract color surfaces or by cutting off some corners. This he did literally or by means of a painted diagonal. So the spectator himself have to fill in the missing elements. Due to this new way of observing and displaying Raveel got a separate - somewhat isolated - [artistic] position, both in the artist-scene of Ghent and beyond."

"At the exposition ['4 Amerikaner', he visited in August 1962] in Bern Switzerland, Raveel was confronted for the first time in his life with art-works of the forerunners of Pop art, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Especially the work of the latter, in which real objects were integrated, encouraged him to say goodbye to abstraction and to concentrate himself on the development of a new kind of figuration. To do so, he fell back to his [former] subjects of the early 1950's, but now he chose to incorporate real objects in his paintings."

"An important constant in Raveel's art is the integration of opposites: figuration - abstraction; art - life; everyday-life - the metaphysical. The square plays a key function in Raveel's integrations."