EDJI Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Chinese artist Killion Huang.

For his third exhibition at the gallery, Killion Huang (b. 1999) presents a series of paintings completed in late 2025 that uses the enigmatic framework of the Tarot to navigate the intimacy of queer life in contemporary culture. Moving beyond static divination, Huang treats the Arcanas as a fluid canvas where symbology is filtered through personal history. This dialogue between ancient iconography and the lived experience of the interpreter forms the core of his latest body of work.

Throughout this series, Huang recontextualizes the dense iconography of the Tarot, reimagining these figures through a “bronze” materiality. By incorporating these statuesque, metallic elements, Huang disrupts his signature saturated palette with a medium synonymous with historical authority and endurance. This shift serves as a rebuttal to the precariousness of LGBTQ existence in a landscape of digital erasure and shuttered social spaces. By adopting the aesthetic language of the public monument, Huang asserts that queer identities, often marginalized by official history, possess an unshakeable, formidable status.

Technically, this series marks an evolution in Huang’s process. While his signature “permanent rose” underpainting continues to provide a luminous backlight, he now applies the medium in visceral, thick layers, scratching through the surface to create “waterfall” textures that allow colors to merge with organic fluidity. As an artist with color vision deficiency, Huang’s heightened sensitivity to reds, browns, and blues fuels a unique chromatic system. These deep, earthy palettes act as a visual tether to the external world, providing a sense of psychological security in a world that might otherwise “feel too gray.”.

Within this framework, domestic interiors transcend mere settings to become psychological extensions of the studio. These rooms function as fortified spaces for queer desire, echoing the intimate, enclosed atmospheres of postwar photography by Herbert Tobias. The compositions are themselves informed by a rich lineage: Pierre Bonnard’s interior light, David Hockney’s pictorial organization, and the figurative language of his mentor, T.M. Davy. 

However, Huang often blurs or simplifies facial features, prioritizing the raw honesty of posture and gesture. By weaving these private interiors into the ancient symbolism of the Tarot, he asserts a presence that the law has yet to formally acknowledge. In the wake of recent regression of LGBTQ rights around the world, these paintings challenge systemic silence, suggesting that while these histories may be scrubbed from the public eye, they remain an indelible and courageous part of the modern human landscape.

EDJI Gallery is thrilled to introduce Future Matters : a new initiative dedicated to artists currently enrolled in higher art education.

Each year, the gallery will devote one month of its programme to a curated selection of student artists from Belgium, presented through an exhibition format. Artists are selected following an open call and portfolio review, and work across a range of mediums and practices.

Positioned at the intersection of education and the professional art world, Future Matters is intended to provide an early exhibition context at a formative moment in artistic development, offering visibility and experience beyond the academic framework.

Reflecting the gallery’s ongoing commitment to emerging practices, the project will become a recurring part of EDJI Gallery’s programme. This inaugural edition brings together works by Samuel Bloch (La Cambre, MA Painting), Marguerite Caux (Royal Academy of Fine Arts Brussels, MA Painting), Nida Dhooghe (La Cambre, MA Painting), Rose-Aimée Guérin (La Cambre, MA Ceramics), Clara Hertling (La Cambre, BA Painting), Tâm Nguyen (Royal Academy of Fine Arts Brussels, MA Fine Arts), and Benjamin Pléau (La Cambre, MA Drawing).

EDJI Gallery is pleased to present Reverse Déjà Vu, the inaugural solo exhibition in Brussels of Belgian artist Michiel Deneckere (b. 2002, Ghent), opening on November 12th at 6pm.

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Michiel Deneckere searches for images that carry multiple layers of meaning, one immediate and recognizable, another more elusive and open to interpretation.

In Reverse Déjà Vu, scenes set in the city of Ghent are the focal point. Almost entirely devoid of human presence, these paintings capture a quiet nocturnal stillness, creating an alienation of the familiar and transforming the ordinary into something strangely distant.

For Michiel, painting begins where photography ends. His process starts with a iPhone image, fragments taken while wandering through the city he grew up in. These digital sketches are later reframed, cropped, and finally slowed down through paint. The result is a sequence of quiet, cinematic scenes that seem to hover between the familiar and unknown.

The title refers to a psychological state also known as jamais vu. As opposed to a déjà vu, it describes the moment when something well-known suddenly feels strange or unfamiliar, as if the brain briefly forgets and time seems to hold its breath.

His nocturnal views of Ghent hum with this tension and depict fragments of a city charged with a quiet, almost uncanny presence. Streets, facades, and structures are depicted with the precision of memory yet strangely distant, as if seen for the first time.

The series began with a self-portrait (Zelfportret Van Een Twintiger, 2025), initially intended as a technical exercise. Instead, it became the starting point for a wider reflection on introspection and youth. The figure depicts an ordinary young man, thoughtful, uncertain, and caught in a moment of self-reflection. From there, the paintings unfold like echoes of that gaze: fragments of perception, recollections, or moments that feel detached.

Across the exhibition, the works respond to one another like scenes in a slow, silent film. Each composition is precisely tuned, creating a rhythm between light and darkness, interior and exterior, presence and absence. Night emerges as a recurring setting, a suspended moment where time dissolves into a kind of vacuum. While the surreal quietness evokes De Chirico, Spilliaert, and David Lynch alike, the contrasts and dark backgrounds recall the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio.

Above all, Reverse Déjà Vu is an ode to observation, to the way perception can shift from recognition to wonder. These paintings invite us to linger on the ordinary and to find, within their stillness, something quietly disorienting.

This solo exhibition of new paintings by Nicolas Coleman explores moments of daily life through the universal language of food. Inspired by a recent journey across the American South and scenes of familial gatherings, this series blends humour, warmth, and storytelling, inviting viewers to connect with shared cultural memories. About the artist : Nicolas Lambelet Coleman paints scenes that offer viewers a visual travelogue, blending snippets of personal narratives with an indulgence in fantasy. His informal and intuitive process with oil paints encourages viewers to closely inspect both subject and environment. Coleman’s paintings celebrate culture and place yet conceal deeper contrasts, exploring how surroundings influence emotions and identity. His recent residency at Black Rock in Dakar, Senegal, deepened his exploration of these themes, drawing from his experiences as a Black American raised in the southern United States and reflecting on cultural tensions and personal identity.

EDJI Gallery is pleased to present its summer show : Coco Samba, a solo exhibition of new works by painter & ceramist Philippine d’Otreppe, on view in Brussels until July 18th.

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Belgian artist Philippine d’Otreppe works across painting, drawing, and ceramics, building her compositions from observations gathered in daily life. Her practice often begins with quick sketches, photographs, notes, or anecdotes collected while moving through a place, fragments that later reappear in the studio as paintings and objects.

This exhibition brings together a new body of work developed following a six-week residency at Casa Voa in Rio de Janeiro in 2025. During her stay, d’Otreppe filled notebooks with scenes drawn from the city and its surroundings: beaches, markets, tropical vegetation, street life, and chance encounters. The works assemble these observations into compositions that reflect the rhythms and atmosphere of everyday life in Rio.

Humour and spontaneity play an important role in d’Otreppe’s approach. Familiar objects, plants, animals, and figures are often shifted slightly away from reality, creating images that move freely between observation and imagination. The resulting paintings do not seek to describe a place faithfully, but to capture the experience of looking, collecting, and remembering.

Alongside the paintings, a group of ceramic works extends the exhibition into three dimensions. Developed in dialogue with the canvases, they bring recurring motifs from the paintings into the gallery space and highlight the fluid movement between image and object that characterises d’Otreppe’s practice.

On the lower floor of the gallery, the artist presents an installation of scanned sketchbook pages, photographs, notes, and collected references, allowing visitors to immerse themselves in the visual references and ideas that shaped the exhibition.