Look again, they're there. Yes, those little coloured surfaces are paintings. The biggest paintings in Victimes are the size of a postcard. You have to put yourself just a hand away from the works to really admire them (and in doing so, breaching Museum M's house rule to keep at least a 60-centimetre distance from the works on display).
They hang in groups, on an almost perfect horizontal line, comprising as little as three and as much as 24 to a group. Devriendt calls them sequences, and it's the sequence that gets titled, not the individual canvasses. Victimes contains an amazing total of 176 paintings grouped into 23 sequences. The paintings hang slightly under eye level. "People have to bow their head for the art; I like that," Devriendt smiles. "There might even be a religious side to it."
I meet the artiste at the other side of the country, in his studio in some backstreet of Bruges where no tourist has ever set foot.
His paintings are snippets from a bigger story that's never completely spelt out - like shots from a film we'll never see. They're mysterious stills of stuffed animal heads or high heels, with or without a lady's foot, a car in the woods, a lonely house, or (a part) of a human body, dead or alive (and sometimes you really can't tell).
"People are free to interpret my work," says Devriendt. "Because I think it's impossible to precisely express what you want to say. I am not stating that communication is impossible, but it o␣en goes awry." But then he adds: "Though the titles do give a hint."
He clarifies, slightly: "Maybe I want to evoke a mood, more than tell a story." That mood almost always has a tone of unease, best described with that beautiful German word unheimlich. "I respect your interpretation, but to me they all seem so...normal. They just show my way of looking at the world."
Sequences like "Crimes and Passion" or "Le désir de l'abstraction" indeed are more like a loose collection of recurring visual motifs. But in others, such as the two sequences called "Victimes de la passion" - one subtitled "De fetisjiste", the other "LOVE YOU HATE YOU" - you do see a clear link between the paintings. "If you look at the dates, you'll notice that the recent ones are more narrative. No coincidence, I'm evolving more in that direction."
Scared to be small
Devriendt, 55, has always painted small scale, though never as small as these. "For years, I didn't show them. People have forgotten about this, but in the 1980s painting was scorned. And if you did make paintings, at least they had to be big and wild, and certainly not narrative. I called it macho painting." Some painters, he concludes "want to address the masses. I don't, I'm speaking to individuals. And I don't use catch phrases."
Regardless of the Zeitgeist, Devriendt kept on painting. "I can't do otherwise," he concedes. Articulating more precisely what makes him tick is difficult. He tries, though: "I'm painting what I feel is lacking."
But he does have strong advice for budding artists. "Don't become an artist unless you're really, really passionate about it." He pauses. "That might sound very romantic. And I know, some people make art just to earn money. That can even lead to worthwhile art. But it's not what's pushing me."
Some 20 years ago, Devriendt started from scratch. "I destroyed loads and loads of old paintings and asked myself: If, in a year's time, the bomb falls, what would I like to have painted?" He started working on smaller canvasses. Over time, they became smaller, and he began bringing them together in sequences.
His work has been compared to the Flemish Primitives and miniatures, the illustrations of medieval manuscripts. But he doesn't like the latter comparison.
"The word miniaturist brings up nostalgia," he says. "I don't paint like them." Thematically there's a big difference, indeed. But the comparison is also a way of complimenting him on his technique. "That I accept," he smiles.
"Few people are aware of the energy it takes to make my paintings. If you don't look very well, you might confuse them with photos, so people presume they're painted quickly." Quod non. "Sometimes I can pull it off in three, four days, but others take me months to finish. I like to compare them to diamonds that need to be polished time and again."
Flanders Today is a 
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