Blue Noise – Glenda León

19 January  –  24 March, 2013
château départemental des Adhémar à Montélimar, France

« The noise is blue, as in the ‘acoustic’ drawing showing a ball of cut-out and crinkled paper. Here it’s in the form of a “music square”, becoming a “music box”: made up of old CDs, cut out and arranged in a rectangular object, resembling a little digital camera with its retractable lens.It’s quite obvious that music, for Glenda León, has a strong visual content. »
(Jérôme Delgado, collaborateur du devoir, 2012)

Glenda León comes from a musical and dance background (american and cuban, classical and electronic), and trained as a video maker in new media from which she developed a pluridisciplinary approach, using drawing and photography as well as installation.She’s drawn to the interstices between the visible and the invisible, between noise and silence, the ephemeral and the eternal, employing a dialogue between music and visual art, rich with an imaginary references linked to cognitive science (the dream, the supernatural, the paranormal…), presenting space sound work and image-based arrangements.

She provides ways of “seeing music and colouring sound”, in the form of poetic incursions which interfere with daily life, keeping the real at bay and suggesting a relinquished temporality, an interruption in the way  things usually are: cars filmed on two screens come and go in a symmetry of colours and movements adopting children’s games; a young woman wearing a flowery dress lies down in the grass, breaths deeply while a shoot, and then a flower, emerge from the pattern on her dress.

These slight shifts reshape one’s way of looking at the everyday, and give it a connotation of lightness.

« Blue noise » is an exhibition bringing together all three themes at the heart of Glenda León’s work: one involves the exploration of interior silence, of intimate space, of pure contemplation free of noise, with minimal pieces composed on an emulation of sensations.

Another concerns a reflection on the world, on the planetary situation, and results in an observation from this interior silence. « Starry night », « Listening to the stars », for example, bring material form to the artist’s intellectual and sensitive approach.The third axe is on how the young artist reflects on the cosmos, and our relationship to the universe.

Glenda León’s exhibition pursues these subjects with artworks reflecting poetry, with its symbols, metaphors, chromatic sound and visual silence.

Passionate about electronics, she “is trying to develop a connection between the human being, his/her environment, and own sensations”, encouraging a dynamic introspective.

As such, by using poor materials, and presenting sober artworks, trimmed to the extreme, minimal, of an intense beauty which testifies great conceptual mastering, in a charged historical context, Glenda León asserts her personal vision: “like magic, art acts as transformer, and consists at times of the simple fact of provoking coherence.”

It’s only the young artist’s third solo show in France. She’s well-known on the international scene, and yet has been poorly represented in France, despite an important show at her gallerist, Dominique Fiat’s, space in 2010 (« Delirios »), and previously at the Plateau in 2007 (« Mar interno »); it’s an opportunity to discover a wide range of unseen works developed on her connivence with the universe of sound as a material to explore through a variety of supports – installations, sculptures, videos .

« Blue noise »… or as if, with this socially engaged artist, one of the experimental partitions, whether perched on a 6-metre ladder ex-situ, or unveiled on paper pinned to the walls of the castle, has become a palpable entity.*

The exhibition’s title refers to a picture on which Glenda León has fixed a ball of magnetic ribbons from an audio cassette, which are tangled and dyed blue. « I took the ribbon from a cassette and looped it: it made a kind of noise. And the result looked like a heart. »

Partners
Dominique Fiat Gallery (Paris), Habana Gallery (Havana), MagnanMetz Projects (New-York), Conservatoire intercommunal (Montélimar)

Practical Info
Château des Adhémar – centre d’art contemporain
26200, Montélimar
T. 04 75 00 62 30
chateau-adhemar@ladrome.fr
www.chateaux.ladrome.fr