N._ vs M.L.

With N._ vs ML Nadine De Meester explicitly refers to the painting ‘You or me’ by Maria Lassnig. While De Meester maintained Lassnig’s image and the dissention using guns, ‘You or me’ is turned into an even more ‘drastic’ work. The statue is larger than life size, colored black with a golden touch, and sitting on a butcher’s block. One could give an obvious interpretation to this work, which than refers to life or dead. However, just as Lassnig, the artist always starts from an internal experience, trying to embody an unutterable experience to an external reality. The work literally demonstrates the adversarial relationship between the internal and external world, between I and the other. The other as real, imaginary and symbolic person or group. De Meester visualizes the expression ‘I am another’ (Je suis un autre) of the French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan: ‘I’ can only exist by means of the other … the other has the power to make you or break you.