Walter Swennen’s (b. 1946, Brussels) brightly-hued, deceptively playful paintings toggle between the comic and the abject, zaniness and severity. In L'ora del bagno (for Eduardo), the sleight of hand is in the text elements, which unify the ostensible subject of the painting, the bathtub, with the fanciful sky full of airplanes above it. There is a comedy of scale here, ultimately presenting a painting within the painting: a mural on a bathroom wall, of which the text is a part. The playfulness with which Swennen treats language and space is typical of his work, with this painting in particular a lighthearted suggestion of childhood imagination.