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The Spirit of the Bull
Form and Spiritualization in the Work of Roger Raveel

Stier (1957) belongs to the series of drawings and paintings in which Roger Raveel explored the bull motif between 1954 and 1958. This piece holds a special place in his body of work. It marks a transitional moment in his artistic development, representing the period between his depictions of his surroundings and his subsequent evolution towards abstraction. Here, the artist still clings to a final remnant of figurative legibility while simultaneously allowing the image to become increasingly abstract. Caught between recognition and dissolution, the bull transcends its role as a mere animal motif to become a form in which the organic intersects with a spiritual and human order.

Roger Raveel, Stier, 1957, olieverf op hardboard, 123 × 125 cm, courtesy Roger Raveel Museum

The composition depicts a bull’s head formed from a geometric arrangement of floating, yellow-outlined horizontal and vertical rectangles and squares. The head remains recognisable thanks to the dark blue horns and the body's flowing contours. A subtle grey line suggests the chin and extends towards the front leg on the left. A similar grey line extends from the edge of the canvas on the left, indicating the right leg and jaw and terminating in one of the yellow rectangles. A coarser grey-blue line, through which the yellow background is still visible in places, forms the shoulder and back, continuing into a hind leg that extends to the edge of the panel. The composition is balanced by a brownish-yellow horizontal rectangle above the head and a vertical red rectangle on the right-hand side of the picture. All of this takes place within a white square, which has been painted with firm vertical brushstrokes, leaving areas that have been painted over visible.

This formal description immediately highlights the ambiguity of the image. On the one hand, the bull remains recognisable. On the other hand, the animal appears to disintegrate into spaced-out lines and planes. Here, the subject appears to be used as a mere pretext for creating an abstract composition — an approach that would become characteristic of Raveel during this period.

Stier was created during the first half of his so-called lyrical-abstract period (1955–1962), which Karel J. Geirlandt describes as a phase in which “the world of forms and colours is reduced to a minimal representation of reality and a maximal presence of its plastic and pictorial qualities.”¹ Within reflections on his oeuvre, this period remains relatively overlooked, although it is particularly fruitful and the painter emphatically reveals himself as a colourist. While colour in his later work is often used more systematically and as a recognisable 'trademark' (yellow, green and blue), here it appears much freer and more exploratory. 

Left: Roger Raveel, Bull, 1957, oil on hardboard, 122 × 125 cm, courtesy Roger Raveel Museum
Right: Roger Raveel, Bull, 1957, ink on paper, 20.1 × 17.1 cm, courtesy Roger Raveel Museum

That same year, Raveel painted a second bull, on a canvas of almost exactly the same size. Both works are set against a white background, but differ slightly in execution. In one painting, the form is constructed as an open configuration of shapes, whereas in the other, the contour is drawn with a single thick black line and the head is filled in with bold brushstrokes of paint that together form a red grid. While the first work has a more rational, almost mathematical character, the second appears more emotional. In later drawings, the bull motif is reduced to little more than a horn, a line and a patch of colour.

It is difficult, when looking at these works, to avoid comparison with Picasso’s Bulls (1945), though Theo van Doesburg’s series on the cow (1918) comes to mind just as readily. In his eleven lithographs, Picasso demonstrates how a single image can be gradually stripped down to its 'essence', whereas Van Doesburg begins from observation and progressively leads it towards geometric abstraction. Raveel appears to have been familiar with both approaches. However, his aim was never to arrive at an elementary form or “the ultimate painting”, but rather to continue exploring “different facets” of the image. Each painting had to be “complete”, but never definitive.² From this perspective, the bull likewise appears not as an endpoint, but as a temporary crystallisation of a painterly investigation.

Picasso’s Bulls (1945) and Van Doesburg’s Cows (1918)

This conflict between containment and ambiguity extends into Play Your Part (2025), where Brugge engages with the mold of a fence, not as a literal barrier, but as a sculptural inquiry. Once basic markers of territory, fences have become quiet symbols of social division in suburban life. By leaning the negative form against the wall, the artist strips it of its original function and reimagines it as a contemplative structure. As Brugge explains, "If [the fence] is represented in positive, that becomes explicit because you're standing in front of it and you can either be inside or outside. But to represent it in negative does something else: suddenly your physical relationship to it changes. It becomes the occupiable space as opposed to the space that it demarcates.” The work challenges the binary of inside and outside, prompting questions such as: how do we distinguish a group of people, and how do we create space for each of them? 

Self-portrait

In art history, the bull is rarely depicted purely as an animal motif. For centuries, the bull has been associated with strength, fearlessness and virility. However, it also has a rich iconography, from Zeus and the Minotaur in Greek mythology to the ox of the evangelist Luke, which evolved into an emblem of painting in the Middle Ages.

Installation view of Jakob Brugge, Real Objects for Phantom People, Gauli Zitter, Brussels. Courtesy of the artist and Gauli Zitter.

In Real Objects for Phantom People, Brugge uses the process of molding and casting not to replicate, but to reinvent. The sculptural process becomes a metaphor for the shaping and repetition of identities, which gradually erode into abstraction as familiar forms are reimagined as contemporary archetypes. Rather than erasing their historical context, he holds them open to new ideological projections and re-interpretations. The result is a promising debut, with Brugge pushing material and semiotics to their limits, only to let them slump and quietly deflate under the weight of their own significance.  

By Pieter-Jan De Paepe