Introductions roses

Mesmaeker created the works entitled Introductions roses in 1995 in the privacy of her apartment in Ixelles, Brussels. Her artistic intervention is minimal, or almost clandestine. The work is characteristic of the artist's position of withdrawal and strategy of evasion. A voluntary retirement not only because we had to make a living but also out of fear of not selling.

The work involves inserting thin strips of pink fabric into accidental cracks and crevices in her home. It's an "experience of perception", as Botquin describes it: "A crack between the wall and the back of a kitchen shelf, grooves in doorframes, a gap between the skirting board and the floor, a crack in the paint, the confluence of two plaster mouldings above the recess of a window. Holes too." [Botquin, 2011]

The artist’s minimalistic intervention goes almost unnoticed. It is carried out with great economy of means, yet it fully occupies the space by playing with the architecture, revealing its strengths as well as its flaws and weaknesses. These interventions also reveal the artist's subversive, even erotic, sense of humour.