Fort Pouvoir Couvrant offers visitors a sensory, dynamic experience, where each work is revealed in changing light and in constant dialogue with the viewer's gaze.
Speerstra Gallery Paris is pleased to present "Fort Pouvoir Couvrant", the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to David Weber, alias SWOX. This exhibition looks back on ten years of studio work, marking an important milestone in the career of this artist, who has become a key figure on the contemporary European scene.
Born in Geneva in 1977, David Weber discovered graffiti as a child in his village's railway yard. In 1997, he adopted the pseudonym SWOX, attracted by the word's sonic and graphic balance. During the 1990s and 2000s, he made a name for himself with nocturnal murals on trains and walls, characterized by powerful blocks of color.
From 2002 onwards, he gradually abandoned public spaces to devote himself to studio work. His first group exhibitions took place in Switzerland in 2015. The Speerstra Gallery has been showing his work since 2019 and exhibited it in Paris for the first time in 2023.
Fort Pouvoir Couvrant brings together, for the first time, major works created between 2015 and 2025. The exhibition title, both technical and poetic, refers to the ability of a pigment to cover a surface without leaving visible traces or ghost prints. It also resonates with the artist's graffiti heritage, while highlighting the visual power of his painting.
The works on display reveal an abstract universe traversed by mineral forms, suspended masses, and tensions between formal rigor and free gesture. While abstraction dominates, architectural reminiscences or traces of his urban beginnings sometimes surface, like lingering echoes.
For nearly a decade, SWOX has been developing a structured and dense style of painting, combining thick acrylic, iridescent pigments, aerosol, and large graphic areas of color. His compositions draw on a vast repertoire of influences: typography, architecture, design, and underground cultures. The material becomes a field of experimentation, sculpted with a spatula or knife, playing with light depending on the angle of view.
Inspired by figures such as Pierre Soulages, Alberto Burri, and Yang Jie Chang, the artist conceives of layering not as erasure, but as an act of redefinition. He asserts: “Covering is not erasing, but redefining. What exists underneath continues to exist, but it is a new story that takes over.”
Now based in Lausanne, SWOX continues to explore a radically contemporary pictorial language. Through this retrospective, he affirms the coherence and boldness of his work, remaining faithful to his roots while opening up new horizons.
