Walter Swennen discusses his ideas on painting and his sixth exhibition at the gallery, "What the body can do," which includes new paintings and both recent and earlier works on paper.
On view at Xavier Hufkens from 9 June to 5 August 2023.
“This game with surfaces, that’s what painting is about. We’re talking about depth or not and all that. In a way, there’s no depth in my paintings, but that’s not true. There are gaps and things moving forward but all you can see in a picture, is the trace of movement. But traces, that doesn’t say much. The very idea of traces… As if the painting always refers to something that came from outside, that came and went. It was a French philosopher who said that in a painting, there’s the trace of the passage of an eternal idea. Or something like that. And that pisses me off. They are not traces, they are strikes, imprints. Which is completely different.”
About the artist:
Walter Swennen is known for his radical, experiential and associative approach to painting, which is perhaps best summarised as a belief in the total autonomy of the artwork. For Swennen, a painting does not need to be ‘emotive’ or ‘understood’: the primary goal of painting is, quite simply, painting. Everything—form, colour, subject—comes from the outside. A poet before he became a painter, it is no coincidence that language plays a vital role in his practice. Although his œuvre varies greatly in scale, style and materials, it can be construed as an on-going exploration into the nature and problems of painting (its potential and limitations), the fundamental question of what to paint (subject matter), and how (technique). The way that he handles motifs—he takes them as he finds them, high or low, and manipulates them at will—is akin to a kind of visual poetry that harks back to his early career as a writer. Freely associative, and above all humorous, Swennen’s paintings explore the relationship between symbols, legibility, meaning and pictorial treatment.
More on the artist:
https://www.xavierhufkens.com/artists/walter-swennen
More on the exhibition:
https://www.xavierhufkens.com/exhibitions/walter-swennen-2