MC Garbage paints what our culture throws away.
Trained at a French school of fine arts (DNSEP, Master's level) and painting for over 25 years, the Belgium-based artist turns the overlooked images of consumer society — packaging, screens, comic-book panels, error messages, even the back of a canvas — into meticulously hand-painted works.
The name is the programme: "garbage" is the visual debris we scroll past every day, picked up and given the slow, exacting attention usually reserved for portraits. Every Ben-Day dot is painted by hand; every flat colour is built up layer by layer — no prints, no transfers.
Raised on 1980s cartoons, manga, advertising and the 8-bit graphics of the first home computers, he belongs to a generation that grew up in a carefree West and now faces climate change and war — most often seen first through a screen. He deliberately explores several directions at once: pop, hyperrealism, screen imagery. His signature is not a single style but a single question — what do the images we consume say about us? Style is the tool; meaning is the subject.
Selected exhibition: group show, Tour & Taxis, Brussels (2023).