In 1999, Jacqueline Mesmaeker gathered a collection of Super 8 films, some of which she had made twenty years earlier, as well as commercial films that she had collected. At the Lycée Claude Forest in Maubeuge, where she runs a workshop, she took fragments and assembled them - movements, loops, gestures - into shots that she edited together to create a set consisting of seven 8-millimeter projectors placed on the floor. The images are projected onto A4 sheets laid horizontally on the walls, flush with the floor. They are like the predella of a central painting that doesn’t exist. These films are like the Apples of Sodom, which turn to ash and smoke as soon as you touch them: wear and tear will make them disappear too.

Since the mid-Seventies, Jacqueline Mesmaeker forged an understated, highly original body of work combining installation, drawing, film, sculpture, photography, and artist’s books. Based on experimental protocols exploring figuration and looking, Mesmaeker’s analytical approach is expressed in forms rooted in the world of literature and poetry, incorporating references to Lewis Carroll, Mallarmé, Herman Melville and Paul Willems. Her rarefied, precise work is minimal, sometimes to the brink of non-existence, but proliferative nonetheless, taking possession of the available space and playing with its real and symbolic architecture to reveal its structures. Erudite but non-academic, Jacqueline Mesmaeker’s work draws on the grand themes of the history of Western art: painting, figuration, historical subjects, nature, landscape, the frame, light etc. As with Marcel Broodthaers, this appetite for classicism is continually distanced by a gentle, unspoken irony that lurks just beneath the surface.

Established in Liège (Belgium) in November 1998, the Nadja Vilenne gallery promotes the work of around twenty established and emerging artists, both Belgian and foreign, in a dimension of close proximity to its artists. It conducts fundamental research into artists with established careers (Jacqueline Mesmaeker, Jacques Lizène, Werner Cuvelier, John Murphy, etc.), accompanies artists with international careers (Suchan Kinoshita, Aglaia Konrad, Olivier Foulon, Michiel Ceulers, etc.) and contributes to the development of young artists (Loïc Moons, Gaetane Verbruggen, Sandrine Morgante, etc.). Since its creation, it has taken part in a number of fairs and shows, has an editorial policy and initiates off-site projects. Anchored in the conceptual and poetic dimensions of art, the gallery is open to all forms of production, including installations, painting, sculpture, drawing and video.