Walter Swennen in his studio
In a new video, Walter Swennen talks about his exhibition What the body can do.
Walter Swennen discusses his sixth exhibition at the gallery, What the body can do (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.”