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Like an image developing on photographic paper, Ruby Swinney’s paintings seem to emerge from the white silk of their canvases. The ghostly figures and landscapes, as intricate as they appear, are simply an encounter between light and shadow. Each painting is a monochromatic exploration of colour as much as it is a worlding: rusted purple, raspberry, green teal, blue. They are not constructions—they are barely paintings. In fact, Swinney has said, she doesn’t consider herself a painter: her technique is more influenced by printmaking. Over the paintbrush she prefers tiny cotton buds, with which she can remove paint as readily as apply it. Printmakers are painters who operate in the negative space, in the absence of things.

Each painting is then a dialectic between presence and absence, a value and a non-value. In a sense they represent an argument between paint and non-paint as much as they do the image made from them. According to Heidegger to ‘touch’ is impossible; even if the distance between us is equal to zero there is always already something held back, concealed. In Waterfall two entities stand apart, and yet the whited waterfall, which envelopes the one, takes on all the significance of an attempt to touch, love, explain to the other. Swinney creates other worlds painted with such intensity that they do—in this ‘other sense’ or ‘non’-sense—‘touch’ the viewer. The elderly couple holding hands in Stairs are whited out, their absence shows a not-touch, a removed touch. The paintings rather inspire an emergence of feeling, an archaeology of intimacy.

In Strand, untouching, two figures walk along a beach. One leans on a walking stick, the other is upright, young. Surrounded by dense trees there is a quiet intimacy between them – and yet this is not ‘told’. The shadows and towering building intrude on them. It is the insignificance, the tininess of their intimacy in the face of such an oversized structure, which moves us. Perhaps the poignancy of Swinney’s work is a product of an anxiety one feels on seeing human life so juxtaposed with the longue durée often represented by architecture or nature. The modern buildings, Victorian fountains, parks and walkways portrayed allude to a passing of history, but a history that is outside of the paintings. They all inhabit an obscure time, a middle space between utopia and dystopia.