Danièle and Jacques Louis Nyst

Biography

For two decades, Belgian artists Danièle and Jacques Louis Nyst collaborated on a body of video works that were at once philosophical, theoretical, and whimsical. In their semiotic inquiries into systems of representation, language, and signs, the Nysts created fantastical universes of video theater that merge the quotidian and the magical. Recalling the Belgian Surrealist tradition, they constructed intricate narrative labyrinths that unfold through word and image play, associative detours, metaphoric allusions, poetic transformations and ironic metamorphoses. These dreamlike yet highly cerebral stories are inscribed with the Nysts' emblematic meta-language, in which objects, images, and words are assigned symbolic meaning.

The Nysts themselves always appeared in the roles of Professor Codca and Thérèsa Plane, articulating their sophisticated intellectual discourses in witty dialogues or conversations. With an antic, often poignant interplay of visual, verbal, and written codes, Codca and Thérèsa set off on discursive journeys into the origins and functions of language and images, constructing a philosophy of representational and linguistic texts.

Evoking memory, the imaginary, and reveries, their elliptical fictions weave legends, myths and fairy tales with contemporary references, from the autobiographical to the cinematic. The elegance of the Nysts' imagery, and the lyricism of their dialogues, add an exquisite poetry to the layered meanings of their enigmatic narrative odysseys.

Jacques Louis Nyst was born in 1942 in Liège, Belgium and died in 1995. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid and in Liège. In addition to his work in video, he was also a filmmaker, writer and visual artist. He was Professor of Drawing and Video at the Academy of Fine Arts, Liège.

Danièle Nyst was born in 1942 in Liège and died in 1998. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid. She was Music Programmer at RTBF (Radio Television Belge-Francaise), Liège.

The Nysts' videotapes have been exhibited internationally, at numerous festivals and institutions, including the Musée d'Art Moderne, Liège; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; International Festival of Video, Tokyo; São Paulo Biennale, Brazil; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal; Paris Biennale; Festival de Locarno, Italy; and the 2nd Semaine Internationale de Vidéo, Geneva. The Nysts worked in Sprimont, Belgium.