Quentins Cabinet

Quentins Cabinet re-visualizes male images from Historical, Fictional and Contemporary origins which are bound together by two primary design elements of format and color.

The technique is collage. Painted portraits are all torn into 16 equal pieces. Why 16? Because 16 is such a powerful and positive number. It's a square number and also 2 to 4th power. In numerology, 16 as a destiny number, relates to the person that you are now and the person that you are becoming or evolving into. 16 also corresponds with wisdom, introspection, intuition, exploration, self-sufficiency, and harmony.
Also, in the history of photography, 16 is also a reference to16mm film, which premiered shortly after the Victorian Era in 1923.This new film gauge was used to document many of the events of the Golden 1920s of Berlin.

The backgrounds are painted out with blue to give emphasis and focus directly to the subject. Plus the blue background also has a technical reference. ‘Bluescreen’ was widely used with analog film. In the transition to digital, they realised that there were visual problems with blue backgrounds and it had to be changed into green to work with this newer digital film technology.
Then comes the historical significance to the Prussian blue. This pigment is significant because it was the first stable and relatively lightfast blue pigment to be widely used since the synthesis of the ancient Egyptian blues. In 1708 Johann Jacob Diesbach first synthesized this lighter blue in Berlin and it quickly replaced the more expensive lapis lazuli based blues.

By August 1709, the pigment had been termed Preussisch blau; by November 1709, the German name Berlinisch Blau had been used for the first time by Johann Leonard Frisch, the author of the first known publication of Prussian blue in the paper Notitia Coerulei Berolinensis nuper inventi in 1710.

Without any doubt, these two design concepts for Quentins Cabinet, which is based in Berlin, were strongly influenced by this city’s history.