JESSE WILLEMS

Willems revisits this legacy with irony and humor. He is particularly interested in a paradox that still resonates within local popular culture: the ability of Antwerp’s inhabitants to negotiate, coexist, and even collaborate with those who were once regarded as enemies. While the titles of the works refer to this historical conflict, the images that make up the collages belong to the present. Rather than illustrating an event from the past, Willems uses history as a conceptual framework through which to observe his everyday surroundings, establishing a dialogue between collective memory and personal experience.

Each work begins with photographs taken by the artist in the course of daily life: fragments of the city, architectural details, and seemingly insignificant scenes collected as part of a personal visual archive. These images are subsequently cut, wrapped, and combined with vintage papers sourced from archives, traditional stationery shops, and various businesses in Brussels, ultimately becoming collage compositions that verge on abstraction. Laden with their own material histories, the papers function as a second layer of memory superimposed upon the photographic image.

Over recent years, Willems has developed an increasingly refined visual language. His works eliminate anything superfluous in order to focus on almost imperceptible aspects: rhythms, textures, and shadows that emerge unexpectedly.

The artist describes himself as drawn to capturing “the things between things”: elements that belong to our everyday experience yet rarely occupy the center of our attention. Rather than documenting reality, his work proposes a way of observing it. Willems directs our gaze toward what usually goes unnoticed, inviting viewers to linger at the margins of both image and narrative.

In Alva, history appears as an echo resonating within the present. The exhibition explores how certain narratives survive the passage of time and continue to reappear, transformed, in the way we perceive the world. What emerges is not a reconstruction of the past, but a reflection on what we choose to preserve and on the often unexpected ways in which memory continues to inhabit the present.