Scale and making are central to his practice — he paints places as if they were models, smuggles maquettes into paintings, and reveals half-built spaces where the act of construction remains visible.
Dominiek Colpaert is a multidisciplinary artist who paints, creates graphic work, and builds installations from his self-titled studio, Topstudios. His work unfolds a layered visual world where places feel simultaneously familiar and subtly displaced — everyday scenes carefully staged to blur the line between recognition and estrangement. He is drawn to the iconography of the suburban dream: pastel-tinted houses, manicured gardens, and the quiet dominance of electronics, which he punctures by shrinking scales and transplanting architecture onto screens or into rooms. Scale and making are central to his practice — he paints places as if they were models, smuggles maquettes into paintings, and reveals half-built spaces where the act of construction remains visible. Titles referencing comics, music, or literature add a quiet but meaningful layer, subtly reframing each image without explaining it. A post-apocalyptic undertone simmers beneath his calm surfaces, evoking an "after the storm" stillness where scenes feel both abandoned and carefully curated. Working in small formats, Colpaert builds not a grand world but an intimate cosmos — precise, personal, and universal — where the boundaries between memory, fantasy, and reality gently dissolve.