Florian & Michael Quistrebert

Through painting, photography and video, the work of Florian and Michael Quistrebert (b. 1982&1976 in Nantes, France) blend formal references of Modernism with occult symbolism. Reminiscent of Constructivism or Futurism, their compositions confront geometrical abstraction with ruogh aesthetics, questioning progressivism and transcendence through their main substances, light and shadow.

The ‘Bleach Series’, based on the action of bleaching black fabric, develop abstract compositions in washed-out claire-obscure through a technical process that recalls photograms. Yet unlike photography, the bleach process used in the Quistrebert Brother’s works engages a reversed exposure. Geometrical forms emerge from dark to light as if painted in negative.

Their recent series of digital photographs show compositions made of small objects pinned to a fabric canvas. These everyday items are pieces of strings, chains of jewelry or wooden pearls assembled in geometrical lines and curves. While these images appear as constuctivist, the roughness and cheap quality of the captured objects extend those compositions to a mystical level. This collection of pictures indeed suggests a set of Tarot cards, each containing an arrangement of symbols charged with magical purpose, like a sigil magic design.

At last, their formal and conceptual questions also extend moving image. At first sight, Ex Futuro, The Eighth Sphere or Stripes evoke early Absolute films, these videos are actually based on projected shadows, smoke or mirror reflections shot in black and white with a digital camera. They captured and edited immaterial shapes in a poor visual quality as another direction to convey a ‘declinist’ version of the Avant-Gardes, a kind of ‘hopeless futurism’.

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