"When seeing beautiful things one can have the experience of touching universal truth. By painting open and vulnerable postures and shapes, sometimes that feeling of the infinite and absolute is achieved. My role in this process is that of the executor: it is not the person that counts, but the work that matters."
Jan Swart
After seven years of intense and hard work in his own studio, the artist Jan Swart decided in 1993 that his work was ready to be shown. That year he made his debut in the well-known gallery Albert Waalkens at Finsterwolde. After his first show, more exhibitions in the Netherlands followed. During these years his work developed strongly. Starting with paintings and drawings he made use of different techniques along the way, such as painted news-papers, postcard collages, photo works and collages that combine drawings with pasted paper cutouts.
Through the paintings and drawings the artist creates with few means a vulnerable image. Sometimes the canvas is not even painted at all, so that the canvas can breathe and the painting is very direct. In case of the paper drawings just some lines (with ink or charcoal) could be enough to suggest standing or reclining women. In these paintings and drawings the use of white paint, mostly kept carefully transparent, gives the effect of openness and freedom.
While involved in painting, Jan Swart started to manipulate newspapers as well. He isolated the pictures from the words by painting the page white, except for the image. Through this process, he wanted to let the picture speak for itself. In some cases he added a picture from a different newspaper to create new stories. In this way the ordinary daily newspaper is given a poetic impact, it becomes a newspaper to treasure.
In his hand made book, called "A boys little dreambook" (ltd. ed.), Swart's technique of isolating a picture from its original context, gets a different form. Pictures of women are pasted on special paper, all soft and ready to be touched. This way of putting together a series of pictures in a bookform, was repeated in "Fifteen manipulations in the painting Table au tiroir by Jean Dubuffet" (ltd. ed.). In this artwork the series of 15 collages of Dubuffet's painting (reproductions on postcard) was used to create a new spatial dimension. Recently, the artist has worked on a new series with postcards of Malevich.
In the series "the record sleeves of desire" Jan Swart again combines pictures. This time he intends to create a new world through the collages. The idea is to past a tiny picture in a greater framework, so that the bigger image becomes the background. In one of the sleeves for example, he pasted a small picture of playing boys in a sketch drawing: the results shows the boys playing in a cathedral.
Swart also works with paper cutouts. This well-known technique of which Matisse was a master gets a new dimension by combining it with drawings. Put together, they create an immense tension. The cutouts are mostly done with pieces of newspapers, wrapping-paper or other ordinary material. Recently the artist started with the making of paper-wrappings into 3-D artworks on paper. With hardly no means a maximum effect with light and shadow is produced.
Although the artist uses many different techniques, there is a strong continuity in all of his works. His artwork is characterized by the effort of obtaining with few means a maximum of effect, thus creating harmony within the image No extra line, no extra color is added, rather left out. Maybe the work of Swart could be compared with the Japanese haiku where only three lines 17 syllables), and just ordinary words are used to represent plain observation with no symbolic meaning. It is the aim to create the feeling of the infinite and absolute with a few lines of charcoal, with just canvas and white paint or with our daily newspaper.
Susan Aasman, Groningen 1995