Walter Swennen at Xavier Hufkens

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which despite the overall inanity of most, does occasionally yield spark, an occasional brilliance in darkness, that dies, and leaves one wondering what light there ever was in the first place, and when its dark its almost chilling levels of it, sort of begging you to hate them. "Quinn Latimer has described Swennen’s images as non sequiturs. But is there even a logical sequence from which to remove them?"

Walter Swennen at Xavier Hufkens

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Flat-footed painting, and the precedent to today's Richard Aldrich or Allison Katz. There is a distinct aversion to deftness. Swennen's painterly literalness: nothing hidden, there is no magic, just the object and just the plodding painter's sisyphean onus, push paint. It makes an image. The interest in this hamhandness is in never pulling the same gambit twice, still producing some object interest while lacking any painterly ambition whatsoever. Doing so with half the sleeve of tricks of most painters, almost ascetically so.