Benjamin Swaim’s painting preserves the silence and places the intensities in suspension; the bodies that fail there inhabit it with their reserve. The event that he gives to see thus concerns little the action or its realization, as frozen in the absence of narrative, but refers invariably to the impression of emptiness which surrounds the figures. An emptiness that engulfs the architectures, the trees and the geological formations, and finds in the large formats used by the artist the space of its accomplishment, from which rises a particular sensation of isolation that persists in each painting.

This catalog was published on the occasion of Benjamin Swaim’s exhibition La Chambre des ressemblances at the Bains-Douches in Alençon from January 14 to February 27, 2022.