Temnikova & Kasela Gallery is proud to present group exhibition by French artist duo Quistrebert Brothers (Florian and Michael Quistrebert) and Estonian artist Sirja-Liisa Eelma.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote that every writer creates their own predecessors, combining into a new continuity the figures scattered throughout history, allowing them to be understood differently than before him. This also applies to artists, and not only in discovering predecessors of the past but also in finding like-minded contemporaries. Something similar happened when Sirja-Liisa Eelma came across the exhibition catalogue of Florian and Michael Quistrebert. The recognition of creative parallels resulted in a joint exhibition, the title of which could refer, among other things, to the working method – in the sense of image framing or a means of communication. Both authors exhibit new works that continue the earlier lines of their creative practice and build a dialogue between similarities, without amplifying them or deliberately matching them. An important role here is played by the semantic potential of geometric structures: the ability to reflect on the history and current state of their art medium, but also, in the manner of traditional ornament, to reveal essential processes with minimal means.

Interesting plays are in turn created by a combinatorial method, which brings together in various ways a limited number of elements, while avoiding visual overproduction and offering resistance to today’s flood of information; involving in the artistic experience a meditative and hypnotic aspect. In this way, the artists have managed to create open forms to which very different meanings can be attributed.

(Elnara Taidre)

During the last two decades, Quistrebert brothers have been reinventing the abstract painting, using a wide range of techniques, from raw oil paint, industrial car paint, modeling paste to epoxy, amongst others. Their intentionally decorative work conveys Florian & Michael Quistrebert's constant research and experiments with light and architecture creating an illusion of luminosity and depth. 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. The contained geometries often dissolve in an excitement of chemical instability.

Sirja-Liisa Eelma is a conceptual painter whose visual language is characterized by visually minimalistic structures. In her artwork, Eelma focuses on the themes of emptiness, silence, absence of meanings, experiencing pause and defining the visible and the invisible. The artist's creative practice is based on the concurrence of the chronological factor and the spatial context; her artwork embodies introspection and meditative peace.

(Exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia)