The short circuit between word and image occurs in the painted surface, with recognisable and playful motifs. These he usually plucks from mass media, the popular culture of collective, generally familiar characters. Like a hobbyist he assembles motifs, painted or drawn, from his vast depot, where he assembles, abstracts and retranslates them in a secure and painstaking manner. Swennen toddles into visible reality with disarming and highly alienating constellations, in which visual associations with irony and humour appear to the eye as witty riddles.