Art Story

In "Fietsstuur", Roger Raveel confronts the viewer with a fragment of an everyday object: the handlebar of a bicycle. The work dates from the mid-1960s, a period in which Raveel was intensely experimenting with the tension between figuration and abstraction. It was also during this phase that he began integrating real objects into his work. The bicycle - a recurring motif in Raveel's oeuvre - represents the banal reality of village life in Machelen-aan-de-Leie (his home base) and the act of moving through the Flemish landscape. But here, the handlebar, detached from the rest of the bicycle, evokes a sense of stillness or isolation. Whether this refers to a moment of pause within the flow of the everyday, or to something else entirely, is something Raveel deliberately leaves up to the viewer. That reflection is particularly prompted by the characteristic white surface on the left side of the image, worked with a sense of depth, which often functions in his work as a space for thought.