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In his artwork Mark Swysen reflects on human behaviour. He analyses the issue from different perspectives and integrates human psychology and genetics with sociology, philosophy, religion and history. Swysen embraces Arthur Danto’s credo of “art being an embodied meaning”. The artist focuses on topics significant to the entire human community, personal anecdotes are irrelevant: he wishes to broaden our fields of vision. To mould his ideas into intriguing shapes the artist constantly searches for the most eloquent visual stimuli. Danto added a third aspect to finalise his definition: a work of art is like “an awake dream that can be shared with others”. To Mark Swysen this is a major ingredient: it adds the indefinable sauce of emotion, adventure, poetry, mysticism, fantasy, humour, disequilibrium and unpredictability that lifts a work of art.

Mark Swysen enjoys the freedom of using any material, object, technology or phenomenon as an instrument. The artist snatches everyday objects out of their usual context and the result of his deconstruction and re-assembling charges them with new layers of meaning. Because of their conscious and even more because of their subcutaneous impact on the human brain light, sound and motion belong to Mark’s preferred mediums. His artefacts question the one-dimensionality of our perception and open new possibilities for interpretation.