Swinney’s work, I believe, is too easily dismissed; too easily passed off as whimsical, a word which has become less description than demerit. A line from Laura Riding Jackson’s ‘The Tiger’, a poem included in the exhibition, echoes familiar criticisms. “So white,” it reads, “so out of time, so story-like.” And perhaps it is all these things, but is also something else besides. For it seems imagination as form has lost favor in contemporary art, now overshadowed by the conceptual, the narrative, and the documentary. Indeed, Swinney’s paintings are an anomaly in a museum known for its blockbuster art, with its high-gloss finishes and large-scale everything.

Intimacy is too often confined with matters of love; yet the word belongs more to trust, to faith. It denotes an act of revelation found in the simple gesture of sharing; bringing that which was previously hidden out from the shadows and into the light. In this exhibition, the artworks chosen explore intimacy in both their content and their form. They touch on universal themes – like birth and love and death – but also on other more singular intimacies; personal histories, dreams and desires. The works reflect on self- intimacy, experienced in solitude, and the intimacy shared between us, be it romantic or platonic, familial or fleeting.

To begin with the objects arranged on the floor: the first a large, uncertain form, shaped from tarp and rope and metal poles, which together lie in a heap, the fabric deflated like a windless sail. The second also shaped from tarp; now rolled up and tightly wrapped with taut lengths of cord. Above these two objects, hung about the walls, are paintings and small, framed drawings in pen and ink. The walls themselves are painted too, with light, off-white washes that trace a series of curved lines. Given how pale they are, how transparent, the lines risk going unnoticed at first; mistaken for shadows, or dark marks left on a sun-bleached wall.

Conceived and produced prior to Robert Mugabe’s displacement from power in November 2017, the works in Halter’s ‘Patience Can Cook A Stone’ are solemn testaments to Zimbabwe’s recent history. A studied seriousness pervades the exhibition; the wall texts an uncertain necessity. Without them, many of the works prove illegible, but with them the same works are limited to a single, reductive reading.

I arrived at Barnard Gallery in pursuit of the inexpressible. “All sorts of things, which cannot be explained or depicted visually, can be found in the exhibition,” curator Mary Corrigall had promised of her group show ‘New Romantics’. Both the press release and an accompanying article Corrigall wrote for Business Day – Artwork as a New Romance Rooted in Nature’s Magic – suggested that the exhibition considered the unknowable, which struck me as only a sly way of saying nothing and also of saying nothing in particular. What was it Wittgenstein had written? The inexpressible is contained, inexpressibly, in the expressed.

“You never want to introduce yourself at a bar as an artist,” the painter Ian Grose, then twenty-six and a recent art school graduate, told Sean O’Toole in a 2011 interview. “Definitely not artist, never artist.” But as to calling himself a painter, Grose said: “I think something about its specificity makes it excusable.” Always meticulous with the language he uses to describe himself and his work, Grose never ‘paints’ a ‘painting’; instead he ‘makes’ a ‘picture’. The maker Ian Grose.