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Florian & Michael Quistrebert - Visions of Void

Dundee Contemporary Arts until March 22nd
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

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