Henk De Ruddere, known as ENCQ, was born in Ypres in 1961. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and has lived in Brussels since 2005. Passionate about people, he creates larger-than-life portraits. Influenced by the singularity of Lucian Freud’s work and his almost obsessive treatment of the portrait and the flesh, ENCQ shares his belief that the painting is the person it represents. ENCQ systematically draws attention to the joys, sorrows, absurdities, injustices, violence, loves, successes and failures in which people find themselves as they go through life. To do so, he invokes political figures and expressive faces, often in monochrome.