Artist Statement
More
is more.
Thierry Lechanteur is a Belgian photographer and digital artist based in Liège. Since 2022, he has been composing images with generative AI for houses of craft — Beauregard, Lebeau-Courally, FN Herstal — under one principle: “Made, not generated.”
In a world where the dominant aesthetic celebrates minimalism, restraint and “less is more” as the only horizon of good taste, my work affirms another path: more is more.
Artist Statement
I claim saturated colour, joyful accumulation, generous ornament. Not as naïve decoration, but as a way of opening up the image, of refusing erasure, of recalling that sophistication does not always require restraint.
My work is born of this tension: composing worlds where the real, memory, dream and the generated image meet. Here, artificial intelligence becomes a studio material, on the same footing as photography, retouching, graphic design or staging.
I build hybrid architectures, impossible landscapes, places that seem to have existed elsewhere or in another time. Image-worlds where references cross freely, without asking permission of borders, styles or the hierarchies of taste.
This maximalism is not always a matter of quantity, nor even of colour. It can be bright, floral, saturated, joyful. But it can also live in a dark image, in a silhouette, in a silent piece of architecture, in a detail that holds too much story to remain merely decorative.
What interests me is not excess for its own sake, but intensity: making images that open a door, shift the gaze and leave a presence. In Scream of a Dying Evening, for instance, a near-bare façade, a red tree and the light of day’s end are enough to bring forth a tension, an atmosphere, a silence.
My images ask a simple question: who decides what is legitimate, what is beautiful, what has the right to exist fully? They speak to those sometimes accused of being “too much”: too visible, too colourful, too different, too alive.
More than a style, this joyful maximalism is an invitation: to imagine more hospitable worlds, where difference would not merely be tolerated, but celebrated.
Biography
Born in Belgium in the late 1960s, I spent three decades composing with images, first as a graphic designer, then as a studio and architecture photographer. That training taught me technique, light and composition, but also the patience of the eye.
For more than ten years, I have been head of communications at a socio-professional integration non-profit in Liège. This work has brought me close to very different human realities: fragile paths, displaced lives, people judged too far from the norm to be given their full place.
This closeness to exclusion has deeply shaped the way I see the world and create. It feeds a question that runs through my work: who decides what is legitimate? Who has the right to exist without shrinking, without apologising, without fitting into boxes?
Since 2022, artificial intelligence has become a space of creative liberation for me. I don’t see it as a break with my path, but as a natural extension of my image practice: a new studio, a new material, another way of composing.
Within that practice, since 2022 I have been developing pioneering work around AI-generated Art Nouveau: alternative architectures that seem to belong to a parallel history. As early as 2023, these images sparked specialist debates on the boundary between artistic creation, imaginary heritage and visual truth.
Today I work at the crossroads of photography, graphic design, retouching and generative AI. There I develop what I call a joyful maximalism: an aesthetic of intensity, colour, ornament, narrative and possible worlds.
My work has found an unexpected audience on Instagram, where more than 411,000 people follow my visual explorations. This response confirms that images are not looked at only for their beauty, but also for what they let us feel, imagine or put into words.
Whether captured, composed or generated, I invite you to consider these images as proposals for more hospitable worlds, where difference would be celebrated, not merely tolerated.
My images are my way of saying: what if we tried something else?
In my artistic work, I respond by creating visual spaces where no one would need discretion in order to be legitimate.
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