Mihaïl Pandjaridis

Mihaïl Pandjaridis (b. 1996) was born and raised in Bulgaria before moving to France. After studying graphic design, he attended the Haute École des Arts du Rhin in Mulhouse, where he engaged in electronic music, writing, performance, sculpture, painting, and 3D work. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. He has been living in Belgium since 2019 and now focuses his practice on music (under the aliases Flegma Joe and Bobby Fatum), painting, and writing. In his visual and textual work, he seeks to alter the established rules of our ordinary environment to create distorted and novel realities. He gravitates toward a kind of magical realism by transcribing and modifying optical and physical phenomena he witnesses in everyday life—such as the microcosm of a puddle, the milky look of a sink full of soapy water, or the shape of a tree leaf and the seed it cradles. He approaches these elements to uncover the reality of neighboring worlds. Influenced by the Orthodox icons of his childhood, he aims to recreate in his painting the physical presence he remembers from those works—the smell of wood and oil, the smoothness of varnish, the shine of the colors. He paints on small formats, between 5 and 30 cm per side, using reclaimed and prepared wooden panels. Each subject is chosen in relation to its support to create a closer connection between the two. By starting with worn wood and keeping the origin of the surface visible, he seeks to desacralize the pieces in the eyes of the viewer—to make them objects tied to the here and now.