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Walter Swennen, QED
Walter Swennen
QED
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Walter Swennen (Belgian, b. 1946)

QED (2014)

Acrylic on Canvas

Within Walter Swennen’s idiosyncratic paintings, figures, shapes, and words are freely and spontaneously associated to produce compositions that cannot be reduced to a signature style. Taking his interest in philosophy, poetry, and psychoanalysis as a point of departure, the artist produces images that wrestle with problems unique to the medium of painting, rather than serve as a pictorial representation of a concept or an experience.

In mathematics, QED is used as an acronym for the Latin phrase, “quod erat demonstrandum,” which translates as “thus it has been demonstrated,” to indicate that the proof under consideration is fully verified. Swennen places this conceptually charged term next to a mysterious, three-pronged figure, which is an abstracted representation of a fan in the artist’s studio. Through establishing an association between these two seemingly unrelated textual expression and figure, the artist suggests the potential of painting to encompass ideas and images that would be considered random or contradictory within a logocentric world.