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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.
