Throughout his acclaimed career, Belgian painter Walter Swennen (b. 1946, Brussels) has employed his background in philosophy, poetry and psychoanalysis to create works that cleverly reference and subvert the tropes of painting. Blue Descartes (2019) proposes a rational but inscrutable system - numbers and colors add up to an arbitrary synesthetic code. Like the Cartesian coordinate system, named for the philosopher referenced in the title, it presents a logical set of rules that refer only to themselves. Troubling this system is the fact that the section marked 8 is “clear” - its outline encloses only the background, rather than another color. This slippage is a droll expression of Swennen’s interest in the fundamental instability of linguistic systems.