Click here: A small white arrow pointing from top to bottom marks the entrance to the maze in the upper left corner of Walter Swennen's painting “Labyrinths” from 2015. The hint would not have been necessary, because only at the top left is there a gap in the outermost of the nested squares, the left edge of which coincides with the edge of the picture. The access is built in on the right and below. You can only see that when you study the labyrinth or, which is the same thing, the plan of the labyrinth. But the arrow is a superfluous ingredient, an ornament that disturbs the harmony of the square layout, because a much more conspicuous marking shows the beholder's eye the way into the interior of the complex. A red line leads from the upper left corner of the picture to the lower right corner,then bends off and continues to the middle of the lower boundary, where it reverses direction and ends after another bend in a dead end.

Patrick Bahners

Features correspondent in Cologne and responsible for “humanities”.

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If you step into this structure, you run into a wall: This is what it looks like.

Of course, the common thread is a wrong track.

If Swennen had moved his brush past the first gap in the second square or had chosen not the left but the right side behind the opening, he would have been able to penetrate further inside.

He would have come at least a few levels, steps, or degrees closer to the center, before this imaginary exploration, like the one recorded with signal paint, would have failed due to the impermeability of an inner wall.

The second-innermost square does not allow through traffic.

The plan view, as which we interpret our perspective, leaves no room for doubt, and there is no need to dispute between views.

Because a labyrinth is nothing more than its floor plan, whether the walls are made of hedges, bricks or, as in Swennen's painting, of white paint on a blue background.

It is a complete system of information.

Each gap speaks for itself, none asks to be filled with interpretation.

Doesn't this self-referentiality make the maze the perfect picture for the picture?

Should that be the solution to the riddle that Swennen is giving us with this picture?

The picture is what it shows.

Painted in comics and cartoons

Swennen, who was born in Brussels in 1946 and only started painting in 1980 after psychoanalytic studies and poetic activism in the context of Beat and Happening and is now receiving his first museum retrospective in Bonn, cultivates a thrown-throwing style. The difference between design and execution seems to have leveled out.

The definiteness of the thematic material forms a strong contrast to the diffuse, erratic painting style. Swennen works with set pieces that mean something, that bring their meaning with them from the sphere of popular culture or at least the excessive clarity that promises a fixed meaning. These can be comic and cartoon characters, graphic ciphers from the magazine joke such as the jumping devil, clichés of advertising, trademarks of artist colleagues such as Mondrian's choice of colors - or very often words.

You then have something in front of you that looks like a rebus.

The combinatorial ability is challenged, only one does not really believe that decoding could be the point of the exercise.

The images imitate the language, but evidently indicate something else to understand.

The pictogram of the labyrinth, as the epitome of unity, provides the perfect counterpart to the gestures of rhetoric aimless connection that are characteristic of Swennen.

Therefore, a didactic interpretation is daring with this particular picture.

An elephant memory test?

You can follow the arrow and explore the labyrinth step by step without knowing in advance where to turn around and where to go no further: this is the linear world approach of language.

Or you can see the whole tangle at the same time: That is the form of knowledge of the image.

In the inaccessible center of Swennen's labyrinth is an elephant. Should the painter allude to the saying about the elephant in the room? Language can denote what is absent and even speak of beings whose moral weight fills our entire lifeworld. But as impressive as what is described in this way, it remains invisible. Conversely, a picture can only show what is visible. What it represents, represents it presently. It is true that a distinction can be made between thing and sign (picture in picture) in the picture, but whether it is understood is a matter of convention.

It cannot be seen from Swennen's picture whether the elephant in the innermost, smallest square should be a fully-grown specimen or perhaps just a piece of paper with the picture of an elephant. The animal is shown schematically, reminiscent of a memory card. It is not captured from above, but the diagram of the labyrinth is not meant to be photorealistic anyway. In any case, this elephant is as small as the space in which it is enclosed. Such an effect is only possible in the picture; In language, the elephant without attributes is always something great.

The designation is rigid, the drawing lively. On closer inspection, it dissolves into the lines that make up it. And so, on longer viewing, the lattice of the labyrinthine enclosure also seems to dissolve. The picture reveals more and more information, redundantly and ambiguously, mocking any description. Walter Swennen's painting is a world of overabundance created by reduction. It's easy to get in and not so easy to get out.