"Fendre La foule #2" Painting

As a painter, Michiels has developed an idiosyncratic practice centred on what takes place between recognition and abstraction. His visual language draws on painting, drawing, architecture, music, art history and fragments of everyday life, which he continually transforms. Images are not reproduced, but taken apart, layered, interrupted and reassembled, until their original meaning gives way to rhythm, colour and movement. His paintings constantly draw the eye between what appears on the surface and what seems to lie hidden beneath it.



In This is Where I left Myself, this tension between concealment and revelation, between surface and depth, becomes a central concern. Historical references, architectural memories and personal impressions are no longer recognisable as images; they remain present as traces within the painting, transformed into rhythm, structure and colour.



The new works take their starting point in journeys and walks through Brussels, Vienna, Paris and Sète, as well as in memories of a forest in Brittany. During these travels, Michiels made drawings and gathered visual impressions of architecture and its ornamentation: the sinuous lines of Art Nouveau, the organic forms of Victor Horta and Hector Guimard, and the more geometric vocabulary of the Wiener Secession. Back in the studio, these observations are detached from their architectural origins. Arches, circles, grids and ornamental lines become fragments of a new, autonomous visual language.



The paintings that emerge from this process are neither depictions of places nor conventional abstractions. They function rather as memories of images, or after-images: something recognisable may briefly appear, only to be covered, shifted or transformed by a subsequent layer. Organic forms emerge as openings, masks or windows onto an indeterminate space. Colour creates depth, only to conceal it again.



The title This is Where I left Myself refers to something left behind: a journey, an image, a fragment or a memory. Yet nothing remains untouched. Everything undergoes the physical act of painting and takes on its own, new pictural form.



Michiels’ paintings demand both an immediate and a sustained gaze. At first sight, their impact lies in colour, light and energy; only gradually, through attentive looking, does the complexity of their construction become visible.