Walter Swennen

Originally a poet, Walter Swennen turned to painting with an independent and defiant spirit, imbued with an offbeat humour reminiscent of surrealism. His sources of inspiration range from comic books and literature to dictionaries and children’s drawings...And the images depicted strike the viewer with their apparent banality: a wedge of cheese, an aeroplane, a saw. But his predilection for the marginal, the absurd and the deviant renders these works less innocent than they appear at first glance. His drawing style, whose lines are borrowed from comic books, acquires the status of an archetype through its clear-cut simplicity. The bull’s head, beyond its reference to cave art, serves the same purpose. Colour plays as important a role as the line. The black background, applied with broad brushstrokes, does not cover the canvas perfectly and bears witness to the corrections and deliberate hesitations that give the work its history.

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