Painters From Belgium

"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."

"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."

"- 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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"The terrible beautiful Life."

"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]."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The Book of Boz is neither a novel nor a poem nor a tale. Even less is it a drama or an essay. It is nothing except the style that inspires it and haunts it, to excess. No points of reference here. No beacon. You sail wherever the wind blows. Stories are woven, end, are reborn, with the flow, before a storm comes up to carry us further away, to the threshold of a new vision. For, that is The Book of Boz : a work outside of norms, indefinable, created by a wanderer for other wanderers."

"For if art, like religion, belongs to no country, it is perhaps itself the only country and the only true religion. Only those hear its call who have that siren’s song within them. The inner riches of the eyes bring out the secret virtues of the work, and little by little they begin to speak... Every artist, every work of every artist, establishes, in his or its own absolutely inaccessible way, this contact of the spirit with the spirit. Provided of course, that the viewer is in 'a state of grace'."

"Kandinsky in Munich uttered the well known words: 'Everything is permitted!' In 1961; we still live by this heritage, which in truth is inexhaustible."

"As for myself, I confess to a preference for clear-cut situations, for radical and even extreme positions. But I also feel a secret and very strong attraction to ambiguous situations... for example, that hovering moment when it is no longer day and not yet night, the shades of emotion between indifference and friendship... (they) are so fascinating because they are so indefinable. That which is pure transition, is all the more appealing to the mind because of its elusiveness. It is the same in the cases of Mondrian, Kandinsky and the Cubists: abstraction and figuration have a common frontier in their work that is so tenuous that we often do not know which side we are on. It is this ambiguity that imports a rare poetic charm to their paintings. Artists like Klee, Miro and Dubuffet have also pitched their tents on this borderline and constantly travel from one side tot the other."

"The 'Cercle et Carré' group owes its existence to my encounter with the Uruguayan painter Torrès-Gracia in 1929... However difficult our relationship, his obstinacy matching my patience, this unholy team of fire and water was bound to produce something. Towards the end of the year, after consulting sundry artists, including Arp, Mondrian, and Van Doesburg, we drew up the program for a new group and launched a magazine which was be called 'Cercle et Carré'."

"To me, the circle and the square where the sky and the earth, as symbolized by the ancient Oriental religions; they formed a kind of rudimentary alphabet by means of which everything could be expressed with the most limited means. They evoked prehistoric runes and the early I-Ching, or Book of Changes."

"When I came back to Paris in 1931, after a long convalescence in the South, the 'Abstraction-Création' group had just be founded. Vantongerloo had been given our mailing list. At the same time I learned of Van Doesburg's death in Davos. The first issue of 'Abstraction-Création' came off the press just a year later, printed in the same dusty small shop that had brought out 'Cercle et Carré' and where I had earned a meagre living as a non-union proof-reader and make-up man. 'Abstraction-Création' had a much wider influence than its predecessor. From 1932 to 1936 an annual cahier presented reproductions and statements by painters."

"In 1936, when the last issue of 'Abstraction-Création' appeared, Europe was in a deep slump. Hitlerism was rampant in Germany and many artists had already fled there... There were evil portents on the horizon; night was about to descend over Europe. It was at that moment that America took up the case of abstract art. The association of 'American Abstract Artists' was founded that year, and it was also in 1936 that the exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York... At about this time a flood of refugees – artists, intellectuals, and men of science – began to pour into the United States."

"But who does not see that the work goes beyond the one who created it? It marches before him and he will never again be able to catch up with it, it soon leaves his orbit, it will soon belong to another, since he, more quickly than his work, changes and becomes deformed, since before his work dies, he dies."

"In very other period of art history, the idea itself –the what – had been primary. Today the idea matters less than the way it is arrived at; it is the how that makes the work. This word brings us again face to face with the theme and its infinite variations. It is no longer a matter of knowing, of possessing the truth, but of approaching it... knowing that the road is long, knowing that the road does not end, knowing that the road is the end in itself."

"Je considère la poésie engagée comme une mission personnelle, un devoir envers une société où on évolue vers un contrôle des consciences : on devient même suspect de ne pas penser correctement !"

"Het zijn zo van die zaken die onlosmakelijk in mijn geest verbonden zijn, met woorden maak ik een beeld en omgekeerd."

"I started publishing small poetry plaquettes. They were about 200 copies. Then I went up to 2 thousand and now I have reached 20 thousand. Last week a publisher suggested that I publish my books in a collection that runs 100,000 copies. I refused: what I want is to return to the 200 from the beginning."

"It is preferable not to travel with a dead man."

"In my night, I besiege my King. I rise up steadily and I wring his neck. He regathers his strength, I come back at him, and wring his neck another time. I shake him, shake him like an old prune tree, and his crown trembles on his head. But nevertheless, he is my King, I know it and he knows it, and it is quite certain that I am at his service."

"You can love a woman. To admire her is hard. You are not dealing with something important."

"A mind of a certain size can feel only exasperation toward a city. Nothing can drive me more fully into despair. The walls first of all, and even then all the rest is only so many horrid images of selfishness, mistrust, stupidity, and narrow-mindedness. No need to memorize the Napoleonic code. Just look at a city and you have it. Each time I come back from the country, just as I am starting to congratulate myself on my calmness, there breaks out a furor, a rage... And I come upon my mark, homo sapiens, the acquisitive wolf. Cities, architectures, how I loathe you! Great surfaces of vaults, vaults cemented into the earth, vaults set out in compartments, forming vaults to eat in, vaults for sex, vaults on the watch, ready to open fire. How sad, sad..."

"It is almost an intellectual tradition to pay heed to the insane. In my case those that I most respect are the morons."

"A man who knows neither how to travel nor how to keep a journal has put together this travel journal. But at the moment of signing he is suddenly afraid. So he casts the first stone. Here."

"No, I have already said it elsewhere. This earth has had all the exoticism washed out of it. If in a hundred years we have not established contact with some other planet (but we will), or, next best, with the earth's interior, humanity is finished. There is no longer a means of living, we explode, we go to war, we perpetrate evil of all sorts; we are, in a word, incapable of remaining any longer on this rind. We are in mortal pain; both from the dimensions as they now stand, and from the lack of any future dimension to which we can turn, now that our tour of the earth has been done to death. (These opinions, I know, are quite sufficient to have me looked down upon as a mind of the fourth order.)"

"Henry Michaux has been very important for me, with his Voyage en Grande Garabagne. Michaux was considered a poet but I find his work absolutely narrative. He would have been a flash fiction author today."