The camera follows the man as he walksalong a gravel path. He is in a park, a place of controlled nature. You might describe him as ‘dapper’ – elderly, but straight; standing tall, like one of the trees he passes. He has a neat grey mustache and blue eyes. There is something determined in his stance, the way he looks ahead of him – not at the camera, not at us – but at a point of destination, somewhere out of the frame.

A perfect analogy for how the man in the film, the painter Raoul de Keyser, saw beyond us. In his early period his subjects were the real, tangible objects of living – door handles and walking sticks – depicted as we might recognize them; as his work developed, his gestures shift to more indeterminate shapes. You can read these later abstracts as symbols for how we feel, how we construct memory (sometimes as shapes coming to us from the haze).

If he were still around, I suspect he would have liked the setting of his current UK exhibition, his work juxtaposed against the classical architecture of Inverleith House, its formal gardens. The paintings are at home in these neat but compact spaces – de Keyser’s work is generally on a small scale; the paintings are about compressed moments rather than grand statements.

I first saw de Keyser’s work at one of my favourite galleries, Zeno X in Antwerp. As an artist who remained in his hometown of Deinze all his life, there is a Flemish sensibility in the work. The Belgian artists of his generation respect painting (I think painting is considered to be a bit old fashioned in the UK at present) but recognise that painting must move beyond the confines of form and technique. Bernard Dewulf, writing in a catalogue produced for the Kunstmuseum Bonn in 2009 said:

Writing about paintings is always wrong and hopeless, but writing about de Keyser’s work is all the more so. De Keyser paints at the edge of what can be painted, moving away from that which can be said. More than any other painter, he compels us to look intensely, time and again. The risk is that we look too far. But looking is the only thing we can … there is hardly a story, there is hardly an image, there is no excuse.

But there is an echo of what’s come before. In those early figurative works, there is a nod to the Netherlandish still life tradition, which might be harder to recognise in the mysterious later paintings. But in their small scale, their intimate, introspective stance, they are also about privacy and internalization. De Keyser liked to make analogies to music when talking about his work, and I think too of the women of Vermeer and de Hooch we see playing instruments, their music merging with their thoughts; sometimes we do not see their faces, only their still backs, as we stand behind them. Somehow when we look at a de Keyser, we are seeing the artist from behind, not able to read his expression, or to know his thoughts. But something is transmitted, as in music, something which can’t fully be explained.

I’ve been trying to work out what it is I love about Antwerp. On one level, it’s like a fantasy, with its dark Medieval spires, cobbled streets and Netherlandish gargoyles crouching in the doorways of patrician stone buildings. There is something about scale as well; I know I’ve written here before of the charm of smaller cities, ones where the centre fits onto a single map and you feel you might be able to get the measure of the place in a few days.

It’s also very beautiful. We first meet the eponymous hero of Sebald’s Austerlitz as he is sketching the waiting room in the grand Centraal Station, and what follows is an amazing history of its construction:

when Belgium, a little patch of yellowish grey barely visible on the map of the world, spread its sphere of influence to the African continent with its colonial enterprises, when deals of huge proportions were done on the capital markets and raw-materials exchanges of Brussels, and the citizens of Belgium, full of boundless optimism, believed that their country, which had been subject so long to foreign rule and was divided and disunited in itself, was about to become a great new economic power.

It’s where the novel begins, in that incredible vast bourgeois station, which lends drama and opulence to arrival. Something of that sense of spreading across continents remains too as you exit the station: the citizens of the dissolved empire are all around. The station is next door to the zoo – I can’t think of another major city where you would find such a juxtaposition, which strikes me somehow as very Belgian, or at least Flemish – the more I travel around Flanders, the more I get the Belgian sense of humour, which is a bit rude, a little surreal. I love the sound of Flemish, its guttural drama. So much less refined than French; a dirty joke would certainly sound better in Flemish (maybe that accounts for their bawdiness). Part of the beauty of Flemish for me is not understanding a word of it, allowing the sound to float over me like some discordant piece of music.

And so to Zeno X, and the new Mark Manders show. I discovered Manders’ work when he was representing the Netherlands at the 2013 Venice Biennale (he is Dutch, but has been based in Ghent for many years) and posted my impressions here at the time. Going to his show first, almost straight off the train, grounded me for the rest of the weekend. Manders’ project is about how we define ourselves in relation to our surroundings, so that many of the works are variations on the theme of self-portrait (the next day, I found myself thinking of Manders while staring at Van Eyke’s depictions of the great and the good of his day).

It’s an important consideration in a place like Belgium, where people move in and out of different languages – the most obvious shift being from Flemish to French. His work always seems to be in the process of being made, so nothing is ever quite finished, even once it appears within the pristine walls of the gallery. His piece, Landscape with Fake Dictionary, suggests this dilemma of navigating a city where many different languages are being spoken, but you can’t understand any of them. It put me in mind of the ‘fake newspapers’ he created for his Biennale show – all real (English) words, but thrown together to create nonsense.

Fakes kept appearing after that, from Manders’ fellow Zeno X artist Kees Goudzwaard, and his trompe-l'œil paintings that appear to be held together by strips of tape – he constructs a model with tape and then meticulously paints strips that give the illusion of tape.

And then the many extraordinary still lives from the collection of the Royal Academy, which at the moment have found a temporary space in the seventeenth-century mansion of the former mayor, Nicholas Rockox. How exciting to find these paintings in the sort of setting they were made for – domestic and intimate. The curators have constructed cabinets of curiosities around the building, matching the painted still lives with assemblages of rocks and stones and glass.