Hans Theys

 

 

 

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Hans Theys

 

Disclaimer

Introduction to the book Tic Tac Toc

 

 

I made this book with great hesitation and reservation. For forty years, I’ve collaborated with artists because their approach to life and their work resonate with me. Whether this collaboration is meaningful, 
I don’t know. Artists create objects that are sometimes considered fine commodities, that’s clear. But dealers and buyers don’t read. Often, they don’t look either. They wait until a consensus emerges around a particular artist’s work and then ride the wave. They compare prices. And in their world, they’re right.

     In the other world, where things are made, artists usually need a witness, a supporter, a companion, 
a kindred spirit. They do almost everything alone, but it’s hard to sustain this if someone doesn’t occasionally come and observe and say something. I have always been glad to be able to be there for some people, and grateful that they were there for me.

     In recent years, I’ve been surrounded and supported by several young artists who insist I open up my archive. “Why?” I ask. This is what Idris Sevenans replied: “Because it shows that nobody works alone. It 
all seems less hopeless for young artists when we see that Swennen also searched, and that he had friends who were there for him. We see that he wasn’t a magician who pulled everything out of nothing. Purely for me, it’s about solace, about an insight that gives me the confidence to move on. Your books are letters to friends, traces of like-mindedness. And in Swennen’s case, it’s about someone who always slips away, for example when he tells you he never uses white spirit and the next week leaves a note on the doorbell saying he’s gone to buy some. Every word is too slow because something new is already happening. That’s why I’m fascinated by the 1960s: the speed at which ideas changed and were put into practice, with all the contradictions it entailed. Creating a record of that, a slowed-down representation, would be worthwhile.”

     I first met Swennen in November 1988 at an opening of Gallery Marie-Puck Broodthaers. Painter friends had told me about him. Michel Frère had bought a painting by him, which I had often seen at his home on rue des Palais. The painting seemed to depict a kind of skull that wasn’t a skull. Frère had recently exhibited dark, sensual paintings depicting skulls, and I had told him that the skulls, as figures, were superfluous in his paintings, because their color and texture spoke sufficiently of his longing for death. What I didn’t know then was that Swennen had a similar longing, likely triggered by the early death of a sister who had been born just before him and had seemed more real to his mother than he was. That sister was called Nadia Liesbeth Carola. The painting was called ‘Carol’ because it was based on a drawing made by a girl of that name. (I dated the painting wrongly in the M HKA-catalogue. It was not made in 1989 but in 1986.) What fascinated us, Michel and me, was that the depicted skull didn’t look like skull at all. The painting was based on a clumsy drawing that seemed to hover between abstraction and figuration. I don’t use these terms anymore, because they distract from the act of painting, but Swennen used them at the time too. He strove to be able to paint “no matter what,” he explained, “in a pictorial space where abstraction and figuration can meet.”

     I first interviewed Swennen in 1994, when M HKA invited me to create a catalogue about his work. Swennen’s story was very disjointed. I wasn’t able to streamline it or translate it into a readable conversation. This was because Swennen himself was still searching, but also because he thought in a fragmented, dyslexic way, in a chain of anecdotes, jokes, quotes, puns and insights, which were often contradictory.

     In 2004, he invited me to interview him for a new book. I listened to him for two days, sitting in front 
of a camera. But he became so discouraged by his own statements that he terminated the collaboration.

     In 2007, I discovered that you shouldn’t interview artists sitting down, but standing up, in front of their work. I travelled by train to Liège, where Swennen was setting up a solo exhibition at Nadja Vilenne’s. 
We walked from painting to painting, and I wrote down what he said about them (because it was hard 
for him to speak, I mainly asked him to confirm or contradict my observations). Jean-Michel Botquin and 
Nadja Vilenne suggested publishing this conversation. I made the booklet Congé annuel that they handed out for free at Art Brussels. Later, the exhibition in question was elected exhibition of the year. I imagined my booklet had contributed to this.

     In 2015, Swennen asked me to “organize his thoughts” for a book to be published by Xavier Hufkens. 
I visited him every two weeks for a year and wrote down everything he told me. Of some anecdotes or stories, I had ten or eleven variations, which I merged into a definitive version. Later, Swennen told a painter that the text contained several statements he had never made. That’s how I discovered that this was a system of his: always deny, never confess. What he did must never become a system; each new painting had to be created in a new way. Fortunately, I have a printed version of the text, with all his handwritten comments (see p. 32). I didn’t make anything up. In fact, together we found formulations for what he did, or thought he was doing.

     During our first encounter, in the basement of Marie-Puck’s gallery, I was fascinated by his large, feminine hands. But also by his gentleness, his willingness to meet me. Together with Damien De Lepeleire, 
I published a small magazine to which we invited him. He sent me an image of two skeletons and a short 
text about death (and about the supervisor of his thesis at the university, see p. 72).

     A few months later, I made the booklet Deux lettres du Nouveau Monde, which contains a letter to him. From then on, we saw each other more and more often. His daughters were the same age as mine. I got along well with his wife Nan and her mother Mamy, who laughed at my corny jokes. We became friends.

     Swennen, who studied psychology, didn’t believe in its findings. I do. Bowlby’s attachment styles certainly say something about reality. People who were insecurely attached in childhood and developed an avoidant or chaotic attachment style are not good at friendships. They survived childhood by learning all alone how to respond to events and moods (that is, without the help of a primary caretaker who responds 
to and balances their emotions) and by believing in themselves irrationally. This makes them people who 
can be alone for long periods of time and work very hard, but find it difficult to live in harmony with others for a long time. They dislike infringements on their independence. They prefer to attach themselves to dreams and things rather than to people. Their friendships are passionate. They flare up, fade away, start 
to smoulder again, flare up and fade away, in an endless back-and-forth and up-and-down. This causes much disappointment and sadness, but also much joy. But sometimes it also generates ‘made things’, which might comfort others. Even if they were made solely for the pleasure of making them: that strange, meaningful dream that gives the lonely survivor a daily purpose.

 

 

Montagne de Miel, 3 September 2025