Roger Raveel is considered one of the most important Belgian artists after the Second World War. His work cannot be categorized in obvious art-historical boxes. Raveel's paintings are contemporary yet timeless. The breeding ground for this work is the immediate surroundings: a concrete wall and the bicycle trailer in the garden, a coffee pot on the table, the farmer plowing his field. The protagonists from Raveel's universe - Machelen, the village on the Leie where he lived and worked all his life - appear early on as motifs in his painterly research. The painter's attention shifts systematically from a figurative to an abstract visual language in an attempt to capture atmosphere, light and "mental space". Drawing inspiration from the surroundings of the village does not mean that the artist would be locally bound: in a daring palette of colors and techniques he experiments in an idiosyncratic way with controlled compositions in which the artist tries to capture the complexity of reality. His varied painterly language in often contrasting techniques and methods is exceptionally fascinating. Roger Raveel's oeuvre has stood the test of time and in retrospect can doubtlessly compete with international contemporaries from the 1950s and 1960s.