“Artists like Michael Behle look inward, employing a poetic, subtle abstraction, and combining materials and textures, from digital prints to oil and acrylic.”
- Hannah Klemm Curator of Art, Andy Warhol Museum (New American Painting juror, issue #155), 2021

Michael Behle’s images wish they could talk to each other, even sleep together. The reality of painting, here, lies in its inner failure. The polyphony of media makes us think that the purpose precisely is in the misunderstanding. The digital image finally sleeps with the painting, and the sense of grotesque and poetry eventually resolves the enigma.
- Hélène Baril, artist/writer, 2019 (Temporary Art Review)

It becomes easier every day to make an image, even an image that by the standards of past generations would be considered sophisticated. I can do this on my laptop using Photo Booth; so can my five-year-old. Mike Behle uses images like these—uncannily mirrored photographs of a cluttered desktop or a still life, impossibly fractured surfaces of punched tin, all of them so simple to produce they’ve become banal, even though they’re not really. Behle truly uses them, both in the sense of deployment and exploitation. He makes them the random ground on which to produce simple paintings, each in a single straight-from-the-tube paint color that pops right off its dull backdrop. What does he paint? That remains to be seen. Some shapes register in a fuzzy way: maybe a figure with its arms out here, maybe a bunch of droopy flowers there. The sheer pleasure generated by looking at these pictures doesn’t quite add up from their parts. But then, Behle isn’t a mathematician, he’s an artist.
-  Lori Waxman, Chicago Tribune Art Critic, 2015

The first room seen on entering the gallery features Michael Behle, with his large flower and speakers audio/visual installation titled Disintegration and a small painting (Your gentleness towards me) across from it.I like Michael Behle. I think his paintings are great, and am glad we in Chicago are fortunate to have access to them at the Peter Miller Gallery. I thought his sculpture was awful. The construction and execution was just too weak to support an idea – the artist’s function of absorbing nonsense from his audience and vomiting beauty in response – that isn’t interesting or convincing. The painting Behle chose to hang was much more interesting, but it would have looked better alone.
- Steve Ruiz, Chicago Art Review, Built, Kranzberg exhibition at Laumeier Sculpture Park, 2009

Michael Behle's canvases at the Peter Miller Gallery look to me like a 21st Century version of that late-20th Century goal known as "Bad Painting."
For those who don't recall, "Bad Painting" was a kind of figurative work that embraced everything loud, kitschy and apparently inept, proposing through the process of inversion that it could be a new standard of beauty. The ideal, as one practitioner from Chicago put it, was to be so engaged in expressionistic thrashing that even the creator could not tell the difference between good and bad.
Behle's contemporary twist involves a postmodern pileup: abstract passages thrown against representation, flatly drawn linear structures set atop figurative forms painted in the round, rainbows of color contrasted with the starkness of black and white. This is done in such ways as to produce a shagginess that looks that much the worse -- sorry, better -- for being violently invasive (color extruded from a mouth to be forced into an ear) or confining (a head surrounded by innumerable cages).
Whether the artist is in control of this or cannot help himself was once beside the point. But the art world today prizes hyperconsciousness whereas at the height of "Bad Painting" it celebrated obliviousness. So we may assume that Behle, in his paintings as well as a lone wood-and-rope sculpture, is fully in command, irritating so effectively that it becomes balm to the hippest of his viewers.
- Alan Artner, Chicago Tribune Art Critic, 2007