Walter Swennen’s "Pouce" features a magnified thumb print near the center of its thinly colored canvas, as if a giant had visited the studio and left its trace in the wet paint. Its title plays on the several lives of the French word “pouce”: a thumb, the gesture of a hitchhiker, and the cry children use to pause a game, “pouce!”, a brief suspension of the rules. This kind of linguistic slippage, a single word pulling in several directions at once, runs through Swennen’s work more broadly. For over five decades, the Brussels-born, self-taught painter treated language itself as a found object: words, puns, misprints and mistranslations surface in his paintings the way a found image might in someone else’s, less illustrated than simply placed, left to generate meaning, or refuse to, on their own terms.

Swennen came to painting relatively late and from an unusual route. After working as a translator and briefly training as a psychoanalyst, Swennen turned to the studio in his thirties, a background which shows in the way his paintings treat sense and nonsense as working materials rather than opposites. A title like "Pouce" is characteristic: playful, slightly off-kilter, pulling the viewer toward an interpretation it never quite confirms.