Although Swennen always had a love-hate relationship with (painting) art, he was already artistically active in his parental home in the late 1960s. He made rather absurdist paintings and objects bordering on Dadaism. However, it took until the early ‘80s before he actually appeared on the art scene. In the last thirty-odd years Swennen has developed a very heterogeneous artistic methodology, experimenting with various substrates and all kinds of painterly motifs and styles, whether or not in combination with word and language constructions. When speaking about painting, Swennen increasingly saw himself as a searching orator and 'intuitive theoretician'. His unwavering exploratory mentality, based on the assumption that everything is meaningless, makes Swennen one of the most striking painters of his generation.
