In her first solo exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin, New York-based painter Eleanor Swordy invites the viewer into the unconscious state of figures lost in the act itself. Titled Say Less, the show centres on paintings in which two figures gaze straight out from the middle of the canvas, directly at us. Their hands are absorbed, almost sleepwalking, in tasks such as basket-weaving or adjusting paper flowers, while their eyes remain blank, as if looking from within the action rather than at it.
These figures, all bearing the artist’s own long blonde hair, function as stand-ins for Swordy’s own practice. Her paintings are full of visual devices that allegorise the inherent artifice of painting. In the work For You, the lower edge of the canvas becomes a surface that catches the scraps falling from the figure arranging paper flowers, perfectly embodying the playful, self-reflexive tone.
Inner Journey and the Invisible Interface
In Swordy’s recent paintings, backgrounds are built up in layered, impressionistic fields, lending the pictures a new spatial tension. Foreground objects, by contrast, are painted in soft, graduated colours, appear almost airbrushed-smooth. These large-scale canvases recreate the visual and emotional experience of being so absorbed in an ordinary activity that the surrounding world blurs, an experience the painter herself knows intimately from hours spent at the canvas.
In works such as Set Apart, the depicted action, the technical application of paint and the picture surface together conjure the sensation of an invisible interface or force-field. The two sides of this plane can be read as different layers of reality: real and virtual, or real and imagined/remembered.
The Instinct of Birds and D.W. Winnicott
The process in which these figures are immersed, especially weaving or knitting, recalls the instinctive way birds build nests. Drawing on Eugène Marais’s idea that when the conscious mind’s utilitarian concerns are lulled to sleep, the body can reclaim ancestral knowledge and an innate homing instinct, Swordy’s basket-weaving figure seems to be dreaming the task as much as performing it.
The work also brushes against D.W. Winnicott’s concept of the “transitional space”, that paradoxical zone of creativity which is, impossibly, both subjective and objective at once. While painting, the artist may be “dead” to the outside world, yet simultaneously more alive and in deeper contact with it through the vital process unfolding on the canvas.
In deliberate contrast to Van Gogh’s feverish speed, Swordy’s slow, meticulous approach opens a reverie-like space where intense focus coexists with a dream state. Her mastery, as Paul Valéry once praised in another context, lies in uniting “the stubbornness of the insect and the fixed devotion of the mystic” to achieve works of rare perfection.
Artist: Eleanor Swordy (b. 1987, Paris)
Exhibition: Say Less
Venue: Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße 45, Berlin
Dates: 14 November 2025 – 17 January 2026
