Source on Roger Raveel

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”