Bras d'honneur

"There used to be a charity shop in the Volkstraat in Antwerp. It had this big crate where people could dump their surplus toys. Around the crate, on the floor, was a compost heap of junk (...). That's where I found those little arms. They belonged to one of those plastic figures, the body was no longer attached. That's the tragic origin story of Bras d'honneur, ha ha." Walter Swennen in De Morgen, 2021.

In a pile of bric-à-brac in an Antwerp charity shop, Walter Swennen found a pair of plastic toy arms, taken out of context. They are the starting point for a series of artworks on the "bras d'honneur", the offensive arm gesture people make to express their frustration or contempt.

Bras d'honneur shows a set of strange, intercoupled arms performing this gesture. The hands are simplified stumps, but they still manage to give us the finger. The obscene gesture is tempered, however, by the painting's innocent style, which is reminiscent of a child's drawing. The unusual S-shape of the arms foregrounds Swennen's familiar resistance to perspective, or is it his signature? By and large, the work plays around with the different meanings of the depicted gesture, the title and the actual act of painting. It's an arm wrestle between the artist and his work.