Often, you'll hear a painter mutter enviously while looking at a painting something along the lines of ”Damn. He just did whatever the hell he wanted.” Variations of this phrase were doubtlessly uttered many times over the last month throughout the adjoining galleries of David Zwirner’s 19th Street location, where Raoul de Keyser’s paintings hang on the walls, their apparent haphazardness inoffensively contrasting with the sky-lit gallery space.

This utterance illuminates aspects of the contemporary painting situation as much as it obscures an actual understanding of de Keyser’s works. It betrays its utterer’s sense — surely shared at some point by every painter who passed through art school — of constraint. In a time when no rules seem to govern painting, when even these sagging, muddy paintings can hang on blue-chip walls, painters nonetheless feel unable to do whatever the hell they want. With museums full of every conceivable type of painting (style, subject matter, size, media), no convincing -isms to point beyond the horizon of the familiar, and a market that immediately turns apparent novelty into trends, the infinity of painterly possibilities is felt to conflict with the freedom to paint how one wants. But de Keyser’s paintings appear irresponsible — “inscrutable,” as a recent Hyperallergic article kept vaguely repeating — beholden to no external demand, no expectations, whether communicative, traditional, or market-based. De Keyser, it seems, did what he wanted without a care for the weight of art history, intelligibility, taste, or sales.

This is wrong. Not that de Keyser, the person, deceived us through his paintings, pretending to be free while, say, catering to a market — a claim that most art writing (closer to exposé than criticism) would revel in, eager for a chance to accuse a beloved painter of personal shortcomings. How he felt when he was painting is irrelevant, just as irrelevant as his biography, or the curation of the exhibition. These aspects are contingencies — contingencies to be grateful for because they allow for the existence of and access to the paintings, but contingencies irrelevant to the experience of the individual paintings nonetheless. One can, of course, imagine a painter who takes the unit of experience to be the curated exhibition, but, if this were the case, it would be an act of violence to break up or rehang the exhibition in a different configuration; violence akin to cutting up a painting and reorganizing its pieces for novelty’s sake. Unless we expect our art to be passive entertainment — like the Van Gogh Experience or the Museum of Ice Cream — the exhibition as a whole is not necessarily the relevant unit of artistic experience; unless our interest is in art history rather than art itself, the relevant freedom is not that of the person who made the paintings.

In the relevant sense, de Keyser was unfree—wholly submissive to the laws of each painting. He may have set up the arena for freedom by being the hand that built the stretchers and pushed the paint, habituated by artistic training and conventions, the eye that looked so closely with such patience that it could read what next stroke was called for. But a free painting only arises from a submissive painter. A painting is free because it creates its own logic. The Hyperallergic reviewer, too, sensed that the paintings in the show had their own logic, but suggested that this made the work necessarily unintelligible to us. The opposite is true: the more completely a painting develops its own logic, the more intelligible to us it can be — even if not immediately. But paintings are not immediate. They unfold in time. Only a general idea of painting, taken unreflectively from pop culture and art history books, presumes intelligibility prior to the concrete experience of an individual work. According to this general idea, intelligibility is the ability to apply a general category to a work (genre, -ism, artist’s name), substituting abstract classification for reflection oriented toward the particular painting itself — and, insofar as general categories are not actualized in concrete experience but externally applied, this is not an intelligibility of the artwork at all. Truly inscrutable paintings are immediately intelligible: they fit easily into pre-existing categories, such as the category “inscrutable paintings,” because they fail to move beyond clichés or create their own logic. And de Keyser’s paintings — the successful ones in the show: Replay, Breaker, Drift — are no such paintings.

The freedom of each painting in the show (those, at least, that attained their freedom) spontaneously began in the arena of rickety painting conventions, set up by de Keyser before he let each painting determine itself: sagging cotton duck on stretchers with lap joints that overlap too far, deforming the rectangular support’s corners, around which the canvas might be folded in any imaginable way (tucked, untucked, neat and tight, loose and puckered, cut off, glued, depending on the painting); on the resulting puckered surface, complementary colors mixed and muddied, provisional marks with erased pencil lines, awkward compositions. The painting conventions that once prescribed a neutral ground, invisible because subordinate to the image on the painting, are made visible because aberrant. There is no neutral given. The paintings themselves tell us that what is beneath or beyond their surface is irrelevant—or, rather, relevant only insofar as it is manifested on the surface. There are only visible effects: real effects (physical forms or deformations), apparent effects (illusions of physical forms/deformations), and conventional effects (allusions to past types of painting, since the effects painters caused in the past — like painting modeled forms or landscapes — make possible the physical and illusionistic effects of paint manipulation in the present). All we have is what is apparent on the surface, and because there are both real effects and illusionistic effects on the surface that we can't verify or disprove by comparing them to a pristine and neutral ground, the pursuit of some concealed structural cause or personal/subjective inner truth (whether a dent on the edge is real or trompe l’oeil; de Keyser's feelings while painting) only obscures what is concretely before our eyes — and what is before our eyes is a particular solution to the problem of how to paint when conventions have failed and anything goes. 

De Keyser, merely the occasioner of each painting, subjected himself to these conditions and historically laden materials. He worked as a hand habituated by an education in painting, and an eye informed by great works of the past — with a refined sense of when harmony is reached, when just enough is enough. The shaky ground of painting conventions is the starting point; the paintings build themselves from this ground, their cotton duck lined up perfectly with the horizontal bars of each stretcher, signaling a commitment to perfection despite the circumstances.