This book is the catalog of a WIELS exhibition of
works by the Belgian artist Walter Swennen (b. in Forest, 1946). Like other
painters of his generation, Swennen explores painting through new perspectives,
integrating principles drawn from other disciplines. After writing poetry in
the mid-1960s,
and as a reaction to the "reduction"
of the visual by conceptual art, Swennen made up his
mind in the early ’80s to explore the poetic possibilities of painting. His
work turns away from the spontaneous and heroic visual idiom of his
neo-expressionist contemporaries. In retrospect, Swennen appears to question
the specific problems of painting, with a predilection for ways of integrating,
“jamming” and relativizing visual culture, whether popular or not.
This catalogue comprises a large selection of
color reproductions of Swennen’s paintings, including an index of his paintings
since the 1960s, and his writings from the 1960s to 2000. It also includes two previously
unpublished essays by other authors. In the first, Quinn Latimer analyzes the
poetic function of Swennen’s paintings in
the light of Walter Benjamin's writings on the question
of language. The second, by Olivier Mignon and Raphaël Pirenne, examines how the
"birth" of
this ventriloquist painter came about in 1980 and 1981 through a radical reconversion
of Marcel Broodthaers’ legacy.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous Brussels
exhibition at WIELS from October 2013 to January 2015, curated by Dirk
Snauwaert
Editors: Raphaël Pirenne and Dirk Snauwaert
Essays by Caroline Dumalin, Quinn Latimer,
Olivier Mignon and Raphaël Pirenne, and Dirk Snauwaert
Graphic design: Saskia Gevaert
A joint publication of (SIC) and WIELS
Published in
2013
A trilingual edition in English, French
and Dutch
24 x 28 cm
256 pages
ISBN: 978-2-930667-06-5
EAN: 9782930667065
