°1946, Brussels, Belgium. Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
Just like others in his generation Walter Swennen approaches and explores the environment through the application of principles from other disciplines. After his first activities as a poet in the 1960s and in the aftermath of visually reductive, and fundamentalist conceptual art, he decided in the 1980s to examine the lyrical possibilities of painting.
The poetry of Walter Swennen is characterized by its radical position that involves the full autonomy of the artwork, which must not be understood or should provoke emotion. Except as texture, or as object, we can interpret a painting by Swennen as the result of an active reflection on the impossibility of creating depth within an area. It is also the reason why his works contain no depth perspective, no scratches, no shadows, nor changing values, except as part of a drawing which was found by chance.
Click here to see more of his work at the Xavier Hufkens Gallery.
Click here to see more of his work at the Nadja Vilenne Gallery.
