Spanning post-painterly Abstraction, Hard-Edge, Minimal Art and Pop art, Raoul de Keyser’s creations are inscribed within multiples histories of Modern Art, echoing a number of seminal academic and painterly manifestations that artists and theorists developed to anchor their respective movements within a clear artistic vision. Building on Theo van Doesburg’s neo-plasticist principles outlined in his 1925 manifesto, de Keyser’s Kabinet, 1989-90, reflects the Dutch artist’s insistent claim that the external world is revealed through ‘colours, forms, lines and planes’ as opposed to ‘arms, legs, trees and landscapes’ (Theo van Doesburg, 'Principles of Neo-Plastic Art', Bauhausbuch, vol. 6, Munich, 1925). The painting, juxtaposing varyingly-sized blocks of grey, red, ochre and black, serves as a radical study in space that prodigiously attends to the formal codes deployed by de Keyser’s eminent predecessor.

Yet while Kabinet’s composition is firmly – almost assertively – non-representational, its title suggests an allusion to the figurative and real. Known to borrow freely from his everyday life to subsequently venture into the realm of abstraction, de Keyser here endows Kabinet with layered slabs of colour that, in conjunction with the title, become evocative of the titular furniture’s multiple drawers. The blocks’ disjointed arrangement – all placed at different levels of the picture plane – further emphasises the work’s exportation to the phenomenological, signifying movement and a departure from the strictness of the two-dimensional plane.