Can the experience of music be transposed into visuals? In the early twentieth century, Wassily Kandinsky made his first experiments in painting by using forms and colours to compose actual visual scores, thus laying the foundation for abstract art, which was more concerned with transfiguring experiences of reality than with representing it. In the 1970s, Judit Reigl let musical frequencies guide her as she listened to the radio, modulating her body’s rhythm to what she heard, transferring the traces of this transmission of pure energy onto canvases laid over the floor of her studio. For this first movement, gallery Mennour is turning itself into a Music Room, bringing in a range of its artists around the visual potentialities of sound with a selection of works from the 1900s to the present. Eugène Carrière’s young violinist is here in dialogue with Baya’s musicians; Latifa Echakhch’s drummer’s abandoned materials resonate with Valentin Carron’s smashed instruments; Bertrand Lavier’s ‘Fauvist’ cello vibrates with Petrit Halilaj’s ocarinas; Alicja Kwade’s brass instrument constructions get in tune with Robin Rhode’s piano keys; Man Ray’s metronomic eye harmonises with the conductor’s hands filmed by Douglas Gordon; and the score borrowed by Matthew Lutz-Kinoy from a deaf Ludwig Van Beethoven resonates with John Cage’s 4’33’’ of silence.
Profoundly cathartic, music like the visual arts demonstrates a capacity for transmitting emotion by mobilising our senses. Repurposing musical instruments and scores, these artists offer up the visual experience of an orchestra without musicians, of an inaudible and yet perceptible music, summoning our sense of sight in place of our sense of hearing. Is this practice of transcoding musical language into visual language a way for artists to insist that we reconsider the place of the human in the world? Cut off from their instrumentalists, the works/instruments are like the memento mori of a silent, hindered, sleeping orchestra, which the viewer may activate in her own imagination. At a time when images and sounds are being produced by artificial intelligence, what room is left to the artist or the musician to distill that supplement of soul that the machine is lacking?
Curators : Emma-Charlotte Gobry-Laurencin & Christian Alandete