Michel Blum and Benjamin Swaim Dual Exhibition at Galerie DIX291

The Galerie DIX291 in Paris hosted a duo show featuring Michel Blum (1928–1992) and Benjamin Swaim (born 1970) from January 26 to April 6, 2013. The exhibition highlighted their elective artistic affinities despite stark contrasts in life and work. Politically, Swaim appears more moderate than Blum, who was cut off from the world after his involvement with the ultra-left, bordering on armed struggle. Blum's uncompromising, relentless work reflects his costly commitment, while Swaim's more seductive and acceptable art aligns with contemporary morals and passions. Blum's oeuvre embodies solitude in vast emptiness and absolute nihilism, whereas Swaim offers hope through his creatures—akin to Picasso's surrealist anatomies—set in poetic, albeit uninviting, landscapes with traces of life, even bacterial. Blum's self-portraits evolve from a militant revolutionary sewer worker to a newborn violently ejected from nothingness, alternating between corpse, sausage, or a monstrous head on a stem, confined to a glass cage, monochrome box, void, or black tiles. Swaim paints as a colorist with texture, without rivaling Eugène Leroy. Blum's smooth technique uses tempera mixed with heated linseed oil, echoing Van Eyck, Antonello da Messina, and Otto Dix, appreciated by a minuscule fraction of French art lovers at the time. Blum died in 1992 in general indifference; this exhibition marks his first true spotlight—a black light.