Dundee Contemporary Arts
until March 22nd
Four stars
Four stars
White light, white heat
and pop art fun palaces are what initially spring to mind as one
enters this biggest UK display to date by the French-born Quistrebert
brothers to a mind-bending projection of op-art geometric patterns
beamed onto canvas in a pitch-black room. Such black and white
counterpoints in what is styled as Stripes 2 (2013) gives off the
image of a well turned out chill-out room designed for sensory
disorientation and altered states in ways many of DCA's shows have
explored over recent years.
In the main gallery there
is plenty of space left between the paintings that make up the
Overlight series (2015), on which are daubed thick-set layers of
modelling paste mixed up with coatings of either gold, chrome or gold
chrome. Inside these already shiny surfaces are embedded tiny LED
lights, both coloured and clear.
Parked next to each
other, with two next door using a gritty powder used for high
visibility road markings, each resembles a mould of a car boot or the
base of an Airfix diorama upended and hung vertically. In the corner,
the projected shapes of The 8th Sphere (2010) conjure up
an array of occult-based conspiracy theory symbols against silver
painted walls that look like retro-futurist cave paintings of
Illuminati pyramids and the like.
For simulated sacrifice,
one could immerse oneself among the flickering screens of Void Fires
(2015), however hard it may be for home-grown viewers of a certain
age to avoid replaying the opening credits of hammed-up 1970s TV
thrill-fest Tales of the Unexpected. The fact that, far from the
noise, smoky breath and rock and roll excesses of any maddening
crowds that might easily illustrate it, the Quistreberts' work is
shown in silence without soundtrack speaks volumes of a more
attentive approach required to reflect on what's on show beyond its
shiny surface.
The Quistreberts have
already been championed by ultimate transgressive art star Genesis
Breyer P-Orridge in his/her essay, Shadows and Mirrors. Here the
siblings' psych-punk titled show is supported by the Institut
Francais d'Ecosse in Edinburgh, who are showing a trio of the pair's
geometrically inclined short video works under the name Amnesiac
cisenmA in tandem with Visions of Void.
Back at the DCA, once all
demons have been silently dispelled, one could go and hide from the
fray in the gallery's small ante-room, where, again set against
silver-painted walls, the jet black paint spray of the tiny Soue-Bois
Vertical (2010) is tucked in the corner of what could easily be the
bedroom of two teenage brothers flirting with their dark side from
sulky adolescence to the spaced-out beyond that fuels them.
The List, February 2015
ends
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