Raoul De Keyser (1930 - 2012, Belgium) is regarded as the discreet grandmaster among Belgian painters of the past fifty years. His body of work is idiosyncratic and tactile, consistently process-based and created without a clear plan. In his early work, he experimented with the basic elements of painting: color, paint, and canvas. Later, his visual language became more fluid and new motifs emerged. The artist liked to operate in the tension between reality and abstraction. For him, painting was a game, an exploration of the possibilities of the medium. He mainly painted smaller, often somewhat enigmatic canvases — playful and serious, seductive and contrary.