. . .  reopen eyes.” And believe me, neither your inner or outer eyes will close for an instant during this immersion process called an exhibition. The twin brothers, who are in fact Geminis, have more invention in their combined little fingers than many artists have in both hands and feet combined. The show is comprised of drawings, etchings, puppets, miniature stage sets, and videos, and all have a dreamlike, often elegantly nightmarish, quality. Much of this stylish darkness of subject drew generously from the powerful Polish posters of the 1960s that covered the walls of the brothers’ studio at one time and perhaps still do. Those posters—bizarre, surreal, lyrical, some even harkening back to the fin de siècle—were a springboard for the brothers. And although I didn’t see it mentioned, I couldn’t help but see influences ranging from Japanese art to Pre-Raphaelite artists such as J.W. Waterhouse, as well as more obvious influences from Redon, Ensor, and others.   

The videos and theater pieces were what intrigued me most. Since the late ’80s, the brothers have created set designs and visual projections of great invention for over 20 theatrical productions,  including Ionesco’s “The Chairs” and Richard Ayres “The Cricket Recovers.” Showgoers can feast their eyes on partial videos of many of these productions. The other videos, including advertisements, are made by animating characters in small stage sets that have been created within boxes. These sets the brothers call “décors.” The advertisements they have made with stop-motion animation are endlessly inventive even though they say making them was their “deal with the Devil” in order to maintain a studio. A Round Up weed killer ad has the most amazing and bizarre looking weeds having very strange and fascinating discussions with one another, while a Badoit mineral-water ad has a zebra painting a lion with some kind of magical black-and-white mixed paint that turns the lion into a zebra. Showgoers are glued to these little ads because each one is a masterpiece in itself. Another small masterpiece is “The Calligrapher,” and the miniature stage set, décor, which contains the calligrapher is next to the video of the same name so one can appreciate seeing this small calligrapher, made of paper, come alive with such magical elegance. Much of the rest of the show is made up of larger-scale videos, many using stop-motion animation of figures and objects within the small sets. Most of these sets are on a separate floor and have names such as “Lacrimi Christi, The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes décor,” which features a Christ made bizarrely and beautifully from wood with many little musical horns coming from his forehead, little porcelain fingers of someone at the bottom of the décor ready to play whatever opus comes to the viewers mind on a miniature pipe organ. One of the many décors that totally captures one’s imagination.    

The larger videos are endlessly fascinating, with the ability to bring the simplest objects to life. And one does feel as if one is living in a marvelously and bizarrely pantheistic world where a screw or a light bulb or a slab of meat can take on a life of its own, where there is sensuality in a wooden mannequin being touched by a wooden hand, where a living woman places a rubber band over her bent knee, manipulating it sensitively as a moon and other natural forces seem to come into being. As she did this, I recalled something Buddha once supposedly said, “We are what we think. Everything we are arises from our thoughts. With our thinking we create the world.” And maybe that is the right thought to end on because these sensitive, enchanted, bizarrely beautiful, wonderfully choreographed, aesthetically stimulating, and deeply human videos seem to arise from the endlessly inventive thoughts of the Brothers Quay and create for us enchanted, albeit not pretty, worlds we have never and could never see without them.