And why not. Raveel is arguably one of the most important Belgian artists since World War II. From about 1960, he was the central artist in a new figurative movement that emerged in Belgium, leading a group of artists that included Etienne Elias, Raul de Keyser and Reinier Lucassen (and whose joint creations included a three-dimensional work of art in the underground vaults at Beervelde estate near Ghent).

Not that Raveel has stopped working today. Just last year he assisted with a project for Muziektheater Transparant’s A New Requiem. Having read the text, Raveel was inspired to start drawing, and the resulting set of sketches form part of the musictheatre production and illustrate an accompanying book.

For an overview of how Raveel’s work has evolved throughout his career, a trip to the museum in Machelen- Zulte is ideal. The works on display fill 10 rooms and are arranged chronologically, showing the development from the early, deceptively simple paintings of people in bold primary colours, such as “Gele man met karretje” (“Yellow Man with Cart”) through a more abstract period, such as “Witte aanwezigheid en verticale afwezigheid" (“White Presence and Vertical Absence”) and on to his figurative phase that combined both of these elements.

One of the stand-outs is among the early works: “Voetbalveld” (“Football Field”) from 1952. My eye was immediately drawn to the deep, bright blue sky at the top, and then the houses and fields in reds, yellows and blues that feature along the skyline. It took a while before I noticed the football pitch in the middle of the painting.

With the pitch painted a pale shade of green and the goalposts pushed off to the right by a black-and-white vertical stripe, the subject of the painting’s title only slowly comes into focus – a curious effect given the pitch actually takes up a third of the canvas.

The use of vertical stripes that run to the edge of a painting – and sometimes even beyond – is a feature that recurs in Raveel’s work. The eye is led beyond the edge of the canvas in a way that suggests the picture keeps on going. The artist calls this “making the painting flow out into the surroundings”.

Raveel has also painted objects, and “Illusiegroep” (“Illusion Group”) is particularly fun. It’s made out of three pieces, each a few metres from the next in a line. In the middle is a wooden frame and at each edge a life-size, cut-out figure. The illusion part comes in with the use of mirrors and square frames cut out of the figures. If you stand at one end, you are facing a black cardboard figure of a man with a mirror on his lower half and a square cut out of his top half. You see the figure, with your own feet and lower legs reflected in the mirror, while simultaneously looking through the square gap to the second and third parts of the set, on which there are more mirrors and illusion tricks.

If you are feeling a little dizzy trying to conjure up this image, rest assured it’s just as disorienting to look at the actual work. Raveel certainly achieves his aim of making viewers question how they see things and making them aware of their position within and outside of an artwork.

Mirrors are a feature incorporated into several of the pieces on display in the last two rooms of the collection highlighting his work from the 1980s and ’90s. Sometimes the effect is playful, such as in “Zie hier een mens” (“Look, Here is a Person”), where viewers stand in front of the painting and see reflections of parts of their body become part of the picture. Sometimes the result is more disturbing, as in “Het graf van Pernath” (“Pernath’s Grave”), where the mirror is in the buried grave at the bottom of the work. (“Het graf van Pernath” is also a poem by the late Flemish writer Hugo Claus, in reference to Hugues C Pernath, the Flemish poet who died an untimely death in 1975.)

On the one hand these pieces seem quite a departure from Raveel’s earliest works, and yet the bright colours are there, as are the vertical lines and the typical thick borders outlining objects in the paintings.

Once you leave the museum, be sure to wander past the church and down to the lake where you can see a wall installation created by Raveel in the 1990s. Again, there’s no mistaking it’s his work, as the wall, almost 40 metres long, is decorated with mirrors, figures and white squares and rectangles with thick black borders.

Once you’re there, it would be a shame not to go on the walk and end up at the De Afspanning restaurant for a true Raveel experience.

The country life

The Roger Raveel Museum, which opened in 1999, was designed by Ghent architect Stéphane Beel. It is a two-storey building set out like a string of differently sized cuboids, following “the rules which Beel discovered in the disordered faltering rhythm of gardens, plots and terraced houses,” according to the museum’s former curator Roland Jooris.

Inside, the museum feels spacious with its white walls, high ceilings and many windows looking out onto the surrounding village and countryside. While the main area is home to the permanent Raveel collection, an upstairs section is always dedicated to a temporary exhibition.

From March 14 until June 20, this will be the exhibition Pictografie, a term that embraces the ideas of the pictorial and the graphic and chosen here to describe artworks that combine the skills of painting and drawing. The exhibition, whose subtitle is “paintings that are also drawings and vice versa”, will include works by Raveel as well as Dutch artist René Daniëls, Brussels- based artist Elly Strik and Flemish artist Benoît van Innis, to name but a few.

www.rogerraveelmuseum.be