A film by Violaine De Villers

Production YC ALIGATOR FILM

Year of finish 2016

In his studio, the painter WALTER SWENNEN invites us to a scholarly and playful back and forth, between his associations of thought and his creative materials, between a way of being and a way of painting.

 

Born immediately after the war, Walter Swennen has been producing independent and radical work since the 1980s. He sticks his tongue out at language. When the words beat around the bush and tangle the brushes, the paint remains the sole mistress of the game, playing with the arbitrariness of images and words.

 

From Brussels to New York, with the complicity of the director and contemporary art curators, Swennen dialogues with her paintings. And here we are taken by the cheerful knowledge of the philosopher-painter, where Buster Keaton comes across Le Titien, Krazy Cat rises to Dada, Mickey puts ears to Mallarmé and Boris Vian improvises with Thelonious Monk. -5cde-3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_has the art of not taking himself seriously but of talking seriously about painting.

 

He is a funny great Belgian painter whom the film reveals to us with mischievous relevance.