Jacqueline Mesmaeker
On Sunday 13 December, the Roger Raveel Museum will reopen with De page en page, the third exhibition in the extraordinary trilogy by the Brussels artist Jacqueline Mesmaeker (1929) in this year 2020. Over a period of 50 years, Mesmaeker realized an unprecedented body of work with distinct relevante within recent Belgian art history. After the exhibitions in CC Strombeek (organization Museumcultuur Strombeek / Ghent) and in BOZAR in Brussels, the third part is now organized in a museum with the focus on the oeuvre of Roger Raveel (1921-2013), who can be regarded as a contemporary of Jacqueline Mesmaeker . The museum invited curators Luk Lambrecht and Lieze Eneman to realize this triptych in Machelen-aan-de-Leie.
The title of the exhibition - De page en page, - refers to a fundamental work of the artist and simultaneously to Mesmaeker's artistic credo to conceive work after work day after day as a circular life's work.
In the intimate seclusion of her apartment in Ixelles, Jacqueline Mesmaeker is constantly looking for ways (byroads and crossroads) to convert her knowledge of art, literature and cinema into visual language and imagery that merge with her own condensed experiences of living and working. In a slow and intelligent way she achieves an ascetic and lived through art production that does not move linearly, but meanders freely between her experienced time and the cultural, endless timeframe of art.
The work of Jacqueline Mesmaeker can be considered as a pond in which the wind creates ripples that give the pond a different view and different - sensual - experiences.
De page en page, is an exhibition that implicitly nestles in affinities with notions such as domesticity, family, landscape and the desire to travel in one's own interior. In this exhibition, the emphasis is on very recent and never before presented work: series of drawings, photographic work and documentation of unrealized video projects.
As in CC Strombeek and BOZAR, but with a new selection of works, this exhibition once again becomes a sweet wander through numerous fragile ensembles - imaginative poetry from which every explanatory word shrinks. Poetry begins where the word gives up and all 'power' accrues to the image.
With some twenty works, the new building of the Roger Raveel Museum will be filled with art in which the experiment of creating expresses itself in a freedom that is a powerful reflection of the freedom of thinking and seeing of us all.
The mezzanine of the Roger Raveel Museum features a series of drawings by Roger Raveel, selected by Jacqueline Mesmaeker - a 'gesture' that can be seen as a museological hyphen of an artist who shares the production of art in ‘ local’ context with Roger Raveel.
Jacqueline Mesmaeker's artistic production is multidisciplinary, intimate, softly conceptual and handcrafted. The connection between the selection of works by Jacqueline Mesmaeker and the series of drawings by Roger Raveel also heralds the approaching year 2021, the year in which the 100th birthday of the painter of Machelen will be celebrated.
In the course of February 2021, a book will be presented with numerous in-depth texts and an extensive photo review of the three exhibitions that were realized in 2020 in close consultation with Jacqueline Mesmaeker and Marie Sardin by curators Lieze Eneman and Luk Lambrecht.