Xavier Hufkens is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of new
paintings by Walter Swennen.
A painting by Walter Swennen always comes as a surprise. It might contain
an intriguing combination of words or an isolated letter of the alphabet, a
fractured message or a semi-recognisable phrase. Perhaps it will be figurative,
abstract, or something in-between. Then there are the textures: opaque or
transparent, rough or smooth, glossy or matte. Not to mention the techniques:
brush, palette knife, sgraffito and impasto, and endless fluctuations and
combinations thereof, not to mention a wealth of less orthodox methods.
Finally, and last but not least, there are the colours: vivid, evocative and
always beautiful. Look carefully at a work by Walter Swennen and you will
discern — either instantaneously or over time — some or all of these qualities.
These material aspects of the work reveal the many and varied layers of its
construction. In short, they disclose ‘how’ the painting was made.
But the questions that immediately arise are related to the ‘what’ and the ‘why’.
What is this painting about? Why is it so? Walter Swennen’s paintings are
not necessarily ‘about’ anything: they are a form of visual poetry, the result of
chance encounters between the artist and the things that surround him, the
funny things he discovers, random found objects and a myriad of other possible
influences, ranging from jazz music, philosophy and drawings (both his own
and those of others) to language, advertising and humour. And art itself, of
course. If Swennen’s paintings had a meaning, it would be, in the words of the
writer Hans Theys, ‘in a material sense, not in the form of a code that needs to
be deciphered.’ This is a large part of their mystery and allure. Swennen, by his
own admission, paints the most difficult subject of all: anything and everything,
a form of creative ‘whatsoever’. But always in an indeterminate time-frame and
space, devoid of perspectival elements, uncoupled from reality and the material
world, free of all conventional associations. Which is liberating and means
that neither the work, nor the artist, is compelled to express or prove anything,
be it emotion or narrative. But on the other hand, the paintings allude to
universal truths: about what it means to be a painter, and what to paint and
how. Swennen paints every day, but many of his works, for all their apparent
simplicity and spontaneity, are the result of a never-ending process of catalytic
consequences and chain reactions: one thing leads to another, this colour
suggests that, the unpremeditated actions of the artist giving rise to unexpected
results that, in turn, set fresh ideas in motion. Each canvas is thus an exercise
in painting, and every work can be seen as a living, multi-dimensional space: a
place where ‘the artist simultaneously moves, thinks and acts’. Swennen’s works
are akin to thought processes writ large, a stream of consciousness that is given
material form through deceptively simple means: paint and canvas, colour and
texture. And thus the painting becomes both object and subject: a material
entity unto itself in which the ‘how’ determines the ‘what’ and becomes the hic,
haec, hoc 1.
1 The Latin demonstrative for ‘this’, in its masculine, feminine and neutral forms.