Michiel Ceulers

Hunted Projects: Can you tell me about the title of the exhibition and painting that shares the same name, Ich heiße superfantatisch (Ich trinke Schampusszy mit Lachsfisch)? 

Michiel Ceulers: I previously used the title of this show for a painting in 2021. During that time, I was listening to Franz Ferdinand, which inspired me to create a painting incorporating lyrics from their song “Michael.” When we were discussing the theme of the current show, it felt natural to reuse this title, as it communicates a strong sense of place for me.

The original painting from 2021 depicted a large canary bird framed with a baroque-style cardboard border. In hindsight, I view it as an attempt to digest and reinterpret the influence of artists like Roger Raveel, known for his use of canaries and mirrors, and then “spit it back out” in my own way.

The painting with the same title from 2024 serves as an antithesis to the earlier work. It aligns with the yin-yang logic of the show, where figuration and abstraction are balanced. In this new piece, the grid acts as a form of “handlebars” or “love handles,” so to speak. I incorporated wax as a medium in the center, allowing for greater transparency, expressive brushwork, and visible pencil strokes.

HP: Your use of grids and process-based abstraction played a significant role in your early work. Now, with some distance from the art market’s interpretation of these works, do you see new potential in revisiting the grid?

MC: It’s a mixed bag, to be honest. Those works opened many possibilities for me, but they were also pieces that some people bought purely to flip for profit, leaving a bitter taste in my mouth, so to speak. This occurred during the era of “crapstraction” or “zombie formalism,” when buyers were mainly driven by the desire to make quick gains. Because of this experience—and the negative associations it created—I largely stopped producing those works, even though I truly enjoy making them. They function almost like an analogue algorithm, with slight variations in moisture, tension, or environmental factors generating different outcomes. I remain their first observer, witnessing these subtle shifts.

Recently, I revisited this style for a show called “All is Full of Love” at Pizza Gallery. Instead of creating large, luxurious paintings that might cater to a fragile market, I transformed the works into wallpaper. In the process, I rediscovered the joy of making them. Following the show, I had planned to preserve the material and potentially exhibit it elsewhere as a kind of “negative” of the show. Unfortunately, I don’t have the right conditions to keep them semi-stretched. As a result, I have started repurposing these materials as scraps in new works. This allows the grids to continue functioning within my practice—not as their original form, but as echoes or quotes from a past era, infused with new context and meaning.

HP: How do you decide whether a specific painting or series should be reinterpreted as part of a continuum or completely reinvented to fit your current vision? 

MC: I think it’s just the passing of time. Looking back, you realize why you did certain things, what motivated you, what you were trying to react against, and so on. Then it comes down to asking the question: Are those conditions still valid, or what has changed over time? Often, this also relates to the opportunities that arise.

For the show at Pizza Gallery, the opportunity came from a situation where the owner, who is a friend of mine, mentioned that he found it sad that almost nobody used the whole space or responded to the architecture of the place. So, impulsively, I responded by quickly drawing up the schematics of the space on a napkin with a grid drawn on top of it.

HP: You mention that titles often function as a “misdirection,” challenging the viewer’s reading of a work. What would you say to those who find your titles too playful or misleading—do you feel they’re missing part of the experience?

MC: No, I don’t. History and narration are ongoing projects. I often need time to sit with the works myself to understand their direction, a process that can only happen after the passage of time. I believe it’s only fair that the audience is placed in the same position. This is where titles come into play—I didn’t want to end up in the realm of “untitled,” which feels too romantic and sublime to me, belonging more to a previous generation’s discourse.

My titles are intentionally open-ended and often presented in different languages. They are meant to function as ongoing conversations or discussions, rather than conveying a straightforward meaning or narrative about the work. In this way, they serve as conversation starters—an example of the potential language that can emerge around the work, inviting dialogue and diverse interpretations.

HP: With a background steeped in the legacy of Belgian artists like Raoul De Keyser and Walter Swennen, you work in a tradition that subtly mocks itself. How do you navigate the line between playfulness and the potential for self-critique to border on cynicism?

MC: Even though my works often seem to question the status of Painting—with a capital “P”—I have a deep love and admiration for the medium. I strive for my work, with its directness and crudeness, to knock painting from its pedestal, making it more human and honest, rather than contrived. The playfulness in my work is a conscious effort to counterbalance the heavy historical weight of painting’s legacy.

In this approach, I feel a connection with artists such as Raoul De Keyser and Walter Swennen, who sought to strip away the grandiosity surrounding painting. Their works often possess a humble, unassuming quality, resisting the tendency toward showboating or ostentatious virtuosity. This humility and irreverence resonate with my own desire to engage with painting in a way that is accessible, sincere, and rooted in genuine human experience. In this context, there is no room for cynicism—only an honest exploration and love of what painting can be.

HP: The painting Le ciel du guépard / Mountains Flow (Gepardenhimmel), which translates to Cheetah Sky Mountains Flow, is a triptych that combines an unusual circular section alongside 2 odd-sized rectangular canvases. The painting incorporates both cardboard and foam board for the framing, whilst the canvases appear to explore gestural abstraction. Can you discuss this specific work for me, and your general interest in making multi-canvas paintings?

MC: It’s funny that you see it as a triptych, whereas I see it as a series of four paintings. However, the framing does suggest it could be viewed as a combination of three works.

I’ve been creating these combined works for a while. Previously, they mostly consisted of individual paintings that needed to be hung next to each other. But since I started incorporating circular or more organic shapes, I began joining them physically. This is because it’s harder to communicate or visualize how they should be installed when the shapes are more unconventional.

To me, these works explore the notions of the pluralities of painting and its many possibilities. I am interested in the clashes and harmonies that can arise between works, and in how paintings can infiltrate one another. This particular piece consists of two cut-up circular canvases that are joined, along with two rectangular forms placed next to them. Over this arrangement, I stretched a single canvas, so you could even argue that it’s one painting rather than a triptych or quadriptych.

However, it was clear from the start that I wanted to present them as distinct works or voices coming together, which is why the foam and cardboard frames are so important. They divide the pictorial spaces of the canvas, but when you look closer, you can clearly see that the borders between them are blurred and that the gestures within the painting bleed into one another.

I am particularly interested in how these gestures question the relationships between paintings—their physicality and their status as paintings, how we frame them and the space they occupy.

HP: You’ve mentioned negotiating what it could mean to be making queer painting now. How does your work engage with this process? Do you see your art as a reflection of contemporary queer identities, or as a dialogue with the evolving language and history of queer culture in art? 

MC: When I use the notion of queerness in painting, I am not referring to the representation of queer identities that is currently prevalent in figurative painting. Instead, I am invoking queerness as a way to blur the boundaries of the picture itself—a lens to explore the abject, the marginal, and the overlooked. Queer, for me, signifies the strange and the unconventional. It is a means of engaging with the uncanny and disquieting aspects of painting, challenging established norms and inviting viewers to confront what lies on the periphery or is often dismissed. It’s about embracing the weird and the indefinable.

I am fascinated by watching drag queens on YouTube discuss how they paint their faces. Their makeup is meant to be seen from the back of the room, not up close—good from far, but far from good! This charade, in a way, feels honest to me. It communicates performative realness or fakeness, and, in my own way, I aim to paint like that myself.

HP: Canary birds appear frequently in your paintings, yet your process seems more akin to a magpie’s—collecting shiny, intriguing objects to incorporate into your work. What role does the canary play symbolically in your paintings, and how does your habit of gathering unusual materials influence your creative process? 

MC: The image of the canary first appeared in my work during my time as a student. I was captivated by how often these small creatures would appear, perched in isolation on a windowsill. It struck me how these selectively bred songbirds had become such a mundane presence in everyday life. At that time, I sought images so ubiquitous they didn’t require an alibi or narrative to serve as the basis for a painting.

Just before the pandemic, I received a grant to prepare for a show that included a catalogue. As part of this project, I revisited my own archives and rediscovered these earlier works. Whereas they once operated in a context devoid of overt narrative, I now wanted them to reflect the chaotic and fractured era we were experiencing. It felt as though I were moving a pawn across a chessboard—reactivating and reframing the image of the bird by shifting it from its original context.

I remain fascinated by the image of these critters and the range of meanings they can evoke—spanning from joy and playfulness to more somber themes of isolation and death. I am deeply interested in the dualities of meaning they embody. For me, they connect with language and my use of titles. But above all, they serve as a painterly motif. The bird can be depicted in countless ways—sometimes even parroting other artists’ styles—yet it remains unmistakably itself.

In terms of materials, I often use found objects, gathered along the paths I take to my studio. There is a randomness to their application, reminiscent of how we, as humans, use various toys or tools to enrich the lives of caged birds. While the bird may be confined in solitary enclosure, it is often surrounded by different structures, such as mirrors, creating a blend of isolation and interaction.

HP: You mentioned that each studio space you work in forces you to adapt and develop new approaches in your painting. If your current studio setup is temporary, how do you decide which aspects of your process are worth carrying over to a new studio and which ones are better left behind?

MC: I wouldn’t say it’s as radical as the question suggests. It’s not that every change of studio leads to a complete tabula rasa or a dramatic Picasso-like shift in style, where everything is thrown out with the bathwater. However, each move does bring subtle variations that manifest in small details. For example, I once lived in my studio, and later I worked out of my apartment. While the implications of living and working in the same space were similar, the architectural contexts were different. One was a bare, industrial space with a makeshift corner containing a bed, while the other was a residential setting. These different environments inevitably influenced my work in nuanced ways.

The nature of the studio space, its location, and even the journey one takes to get there can lead to small but meaningful changes in the work. At times, I’ve shared studio spaces, and the presence and work of others—whether consciously or unconsciously—can begin to interact with my own, simply due to proximity.

It is these subtle influences—the shape of the studio and the routines it dictates—that interest me deeply. Moving to a new space inherently brings about shifts in routine, from cleaning out and rediscovering older works that were gathering dust on a storage rack to making decisions about what to keep and what to discard. These processes have a quiet but profound impact on my practice and creative flow.

HP: You talk about being part of a generation that experienced a sudden halt in momentum and the challenges that came with it. How did this period of introspection shape your current approach to both the creative process and the art market?

MC:  Every now and then, a window of opportunity opens, and for me, it came during a period of renewed interest and focus on abstraction. This is how my early work was introduced in Belgium and later internationally. Most of the artists emerging on the scene at that time tended to work in a process-based manner and often created works in series, which led to the term “Zombie Formalism” being coined by critic Walter Robinson. Personally, this period brought many opportunities to exhibit my work. However, it happened so quickly that I hardly had the time to sit with the work and reflect on it. While things were good, they came crashing down just as fast. Many collectors were buying artworks solely to flip them for quick profit, ultimately hurting the development and market for young artists.

It was a confusing moment when things started to unravel, and the market shifted its focus toward more figurative works. This shift made me question my role as an artist and my relationship with my own practice. In hindsight, I’m grateful for the crisis because it forced me to question myself, experiment, and rediscover the joy of play in my work. Selling is satisfying, but understanding that it is not the primary motivation gives a freedom that money cannot buy.

HP: Your approach to constructing paintings—assembling multiple canvases and pieces of wood in a way that feels both sculptural and seemingly random—is intriguing. The backs of your paintings are as wonderful as the front. What draws you to this method of creation, and what does it bring to your work?

MC:  Originally, it had to do with a fear of the pristine white canvas and was also motivated by economic concerns. Even though these motivations haven’t completely disappeared, at the moment, it’s mostly about challenging myself. I like to be surprised by my own work, and working with found materials enhances this. Their size and shape are determined by others outside of myself, and often, they already have a patina or history that challenges and inspires me.

I start most of my works by laying them on the floor so I can experiment with the forms and see what resonates with me. With my stapler in hand, I can quickly create these surfaces and alter them if needed. In making them, there is a lot of freedom, chance, and play, which is something I really enjoy!

For me, most of my work deals with the notion of painting as an object. I am a hands-on person, even though I’m not the greatest handyman. Somehow, in painting, I can get away with it. Besides this, I am also very tactile—I like to touch different textures and hold things in my hands, which explains the many materials often listed alongside the works.

I also really enjoy seeing the backs of paintings, something that is increasingly documented on auction sites. I call it “painter’s porn”—secret information that is revealed. The backs often detail the history of the piece, where it was displayed, whether it was altered, and so on. Often, it can tell you about the process and history behind making the work.