Doors to the Cosmos

“Many paintings are there to be looked at, but the best ones provide a mediumistic space where you can stay indefinitely.” — Guo Xi (1020–1090) “Each relationship (…) between an interior and an exterior proceeds from two aspects of dependence. It provides at once separation and connection – in other words: differentiation and transition, interruption and continuity, boundary and crossing.” — Pierre von Meiss, From Form to Place, 1986 The new series of paintings by Florian and Michael Quistrebert, produced for their new exhibition at Galerie Crèvecœur, puts oil back at the heart of their practice. They had side-lined it for fifteen years, turning instead to modelling paste, acrylic or industrial paint. Interior, exterior. The forms perhaps evoke above all constructions and bodies. Abyssal, labyrinthine architectures; colossal busts. Only a few details allow these forms to be identified exactly. Dense colours shift physiologically one into another, while creating an illusory complementarity. Working with shading and fading, Florian & Michael Quistrebert set off effects of rupture and continuity, which the gaze recomposes in its own way, under the influence of retinal persistence. Bodies like architectures, or architectures like bodies. Interior, exterior. It is a convention in the writing of a film scenario to indicate where the scene is taking place. To know where we are, before even imagining the decor. Where are we, when looking at Florian & Michael Quistrebert’s paintings? Not in constructions or with busts, but, through a play of projection, in the light and shadow of undated, untitled labyrinthine edifices, or superhuman torsos. In the exhibition, Doors to the Cosmos, which requires entering two separate spaces, at 5 and at 7 rue de Beaune, with the need to pass via the street, the artists toy with the ambiguity of physical and metaphysical depictions which runs through all painting.