L’atelier du peintre calligraphe (2019) Design by Nadine Wandel

She sings, her voice high pitched. It could fall into his throat, swallowed by the treble. She looks aside, quips, mocking herself more than the world. She had, for years, the seriousness and consistency of an opera singing teacher in an Academy class... She passed naturally from Baudelaire set to music by Poulenc, to klezmer so scrupulously articulated... that well-dressed old ladies congratulated her on her Yiddish singing.

She was, and still is, throughout their common cinematographic life, the muse, the muse, the counter-shot of itinerancy – his “itin-errance” – of the filmmaker Boris Lehman.

Nadine has never ceased to skip her life, always seriously, always with a quirky look. Nadine is inscrutable.

And today more than ever.

Nadine lives in a charming little house in a quaint neighborhood on the other side of the canal, with a slightly English look. Is it this sedentarization that now pushes her to build with infinite patience miniatures of fantasized rooms, houses within the house within the house...rooms within rooms within rooms...populated with furniture built in the twelfth century on the scale of reality? The one who was slow to land devotes part of her time to mastering materials with her fingertips which must seem giant to them. Whether it's "La Classe" or "Le Salon de Musique" or, even more, "Schmuel Anski's Japanese Salon", we are fascinated by what space owes to time, precision to concentration, the will to humility. It is these opposing and fighting forces that mobilize the gaze.It doesn't seem like much - one might say - and yet, what pushes this woman to reconnect with a certain childhood in order to dominate the space of the grown-ups? They are models, miniatures with which, precisely, one cannot play. No more question of touching them once they are completed.The weight of an ill-fitting look could reduce everything to nothing.

SO ? A whole journey dedicated to the rigorous construction of a fragility, a whole life to start from scratch. There is a sense of excess in wanting to reduce the world to its miniature.

• Nationality: BELGIUM
• Date of birth : 1953
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Belgian Artists