ART BRUSSELS 2026

EDJI is pleased to announce its debut participation at Art Brussels, with a solo presentation by Flemish artist Michiel Deneckere.

The gallery will be part of the Discovery section, which brings together young galleries presenting focused projects by emerging artists not yet widely known within the European context.

--

Michiel Deneckere (b. 2002, Ghent, Belgium) graduated with a Master in Painting from the LUCA School of Arts in Ghent in 2025. He held his first solo exhibition in Antwerp in 2024, followed by a second in Brussels with EDJI Gallery in 2025. In 2026, he moved to Brussels, where he now lives and works. His presentation at Art Brussels 2026, where we will present a solo booth of new works, marks his art fair debut.

Michiel Deneckere’s work begins with what is close at hand. The city, first of all. He walks without much of a plan, drifting, lingering, doubling back. Sometimes he photographs almost without looking. A street corner at night, a shutter half closed, light catching on something ordinary. Other times the images come to him uninvited, pulled from the endless scroll of a phone screen, absorbed almost unconsciously.

His iPhone becomes a kind of private archive. Not organised, not especially coherent. Just a flow of fragments. He returns to it later, sifting through, drawn to certain images without always knowing why. Something in their mood, their tension, a detail that refuses to settle. He pulls them out of circulation and begins again.

In the paintings, these images shift. Slightly at first - a detail disappears, a shadow deepens, a form is pushed forward or held back. The scene tightens. What was once incidental starts to feel staged, almost inevitable. Painting slows everything down. It fixes the image in place, but also distorts it, quietly. What we see is no longer quite what was there.

The works are rarely alone. They gather in small constellations, leaning on one another, echoing, contradicting. A street answers another street. A window repeats itself across canvases. Meaning slips between them. It is not contained in any single image.

Darkness plays a central role. Figures and objects emerge from it as if lit on a stage. There is something theatrical here, but also something more intimate. The light isolates. It insists. It asks you to look longer than you normally would. One thinks, inevitably, of chiaroscuro, but stripped of its drama, held closer to the everyday.

Cinema hovers in the background. Not narrative cinema, but something looser, more elusive. The pacing of a sequence. The cut between one image and the next. At times it recalls Surrealist cinema, where logic gives way to association and the image carries its own quiet charge. Each painting feels as though it has been caught mid-scene, as if an unseen camera had paused just long enough.

What interests Deneckere is not spectacle, but attention. How a place reveals itself slowly, through repetition and return. How time stretches when you look closely enough. The city becomes something else entirely under this gaze. Familiar, but unsettled.

And beneath it all, a longer memory persists. Painting is never neutral. It carries with it centuries of images, gestures, ways of seeing. They surface here, subtly, almost against the artist’s will. In the curve of a shadow. In the way a body is held in light. We recognise more than we realise.

--

To receive a preview of the booth, please email us at hello@edjigallery.com, or reach out via the website contact form.