Michiel Deneckere

Michiel Deneckere (b. 2002, Ghent) is a painter based in Brussels. A graduate of the Luca School of Arts, his work explores the boundary between observation and imagination. Influenced early in his studies by artists such as Léon Spilliaert and Giorgio de Chirico, Deneckere was drawn to their use of light and their evocation of alienation and desolation. Like them, he constructs stylised, almost theatrical representations of the city.

For Deneckere, painting begins where the photograph ends. His process often starts with a fleeting iPhone snapshot - fragments captured while wandering through the city he grew up in. These digital impressions are reframed, cropped, and slowly translated through layers of paint. The result is a series of quiet, cinematic scenes that hover between the familiar and the dreamlike, with facades that feel like stage sets and figures that appear as characters within a larger imagined portrait of Ghent.