Rob Swainston: We thought they thought what we thought, but they didn’t.

Rob Swainston’s recent woodblock prints are dark and overpowering. Printed on oversized sheets of fabric or paper, their saturated, off-register layers of barely decipherable imagery penetrate the viewer’s consciousness like newsprint rubbing off on a reader’s fingers. Their overall effect speaks to our experience of a time in which fact easily passes as fiction, subterfuge is systemic, and the endless stream of simultaneous information we absorb never quite falls into line.