See-Through: Roger Raveel revisited, curated by Zeynep Kubat

Machelen-aan-de-Leie, a small village near Gent, is a place cherished by Roger Raveel. Being born there in 1921, he stayed there his whole life, living and working, until he passed away in 2013. As a result, he drew a lot of inspiration from the garden and the living room of his own home, for the compositions of his work. For him, the village was the world, yet this did not imply that Raveel was tied down locally. For stylistic features, he looked further away, drawing inspiration from artists such as Giotto, Van Gogh and Karel Appel.
Cobra art was introduced to him by Hugo Claus, who he met at 1945 after finalizing his studies at the Municipal Academy of Deinze and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Ghent, where he was mentored by Hubert Malfait and Jos Verdegem. However, Raveel wanted to go in other directions with his art.

Raveel experimented with different styles and did not shy away from iterations of his own compositions. Thus, elements such as his hands, his cat, the kitchen table and pigeons take shape throughout his oeuvre. From these, he refined his own visual language with recognisable graphic elements, with which he tells the story of a modernising village. So, Raveel developed his “New vision”, by opting for the trivial aspects of everyday life and integrating these objects into his painting. Mirrors draw the viewer and the surroundings into the work. Art and life flows into each other, as if the two are intertwined.

The twists and turns that make Raveel's work exciting are evidently found in his paintings, but even more so in his drawings. Drawings was a main practice in his atelier which fuelled his paintings, it is a practical form of thinking. Looking at Raveel's works on paper, it becomes evident how his drawings discovered and explored motifs, and how he investigated compositions of forms on a white surface. His drawings are an important source of knowledge when looking at Raveel's oeuvre. They feed off each other, as well as his other works does.