Jeroen de Rijke (1970 – 2006) and Willem de Rooij produced films and photographs, concentrating on a single take, action, or object. Using the disturbing ‘beauty’ of familiar compositional and formal principles, their images questioned representation by over-determining their pictorial or compositional references.

The artists made the qualities of film available as moving-image aggregates: space and time, dialogues, sound, light, focus, are all ‘performers’ in their own right. Crystals I–IX (2003), which uses scientific apparatus and an abstract experimental film approach, shows the crystallization process of substances like plant fertilizer or vitamin C, hybridizing our reading of scientific and artistic research, organic and abstract vocabulary, and natural forms and artefacts.

The book discusses how socio-political issues and cultural-historical artefacts become the background for ‘cinema in its decontextualized form.’ Focusing on a selected group of works in which the artists specifically addressed the relationship between abstract and objective models of representation, it includes a large number of color images, as well as four new essays that take a variety of scientific and theoretical approaches.

Designed by Yvonne Quirmbach in close collaboration with the artists, this comprehensive monograph is a key to their complex and challenging work.

Published in collaboration with the Kunsthalle Zürich on the occasion of the artists’ exhibition.

English and German text.