Music is at full blast, deafening silence

neon lights, transformer, cables, 300 x 400 cm

Music is at full blast, deafening silence is a phrase that takes shape and unfolds on the wall using blue neon tubes.

It reads: “The music is blaring, the silence is deafening.”
But the work is not limited to this single act of visual reading.
In fact, visitors engage with this statement through its sculptural, luminous, typographic, and sonic qualities alike. These elements—deliberately blurred by the artist for the brief moment of a glance—propel the statement into a cascade of ceaseless movements:
-- The movement is, first and foremost, that of the neon gas circulating inside the tube, but it is also the movement of this blue light spreading beyond the tube, altering the space’s coordinates and allowing visitors to experience the exhibition in a different way.
-- The movement also draws on a typeface designed by the artist, a font called “BF-15,” which has the power to initiate rhizomatic connections and branches. In other words, even if it is stated there in space, everything remains to be done and undone, perpetually.
-- Movement is, ultimately, the power that a work has to make sound visible: the powerful visual quality of the phrase generates sonic images that, while certainly not audible, are nonetheless images laden with sound and meaning: the cacophony of a consumerist world, the suppression of the sounds of life, superficial chatter, and the violence of a stifled reality.

In fact, the visitor is simultaneously caught between absorption and critical skepticism regarding the experience of the work. It is certainly these discrepancies and unexpected connections that give the work its moving and unsettling power.

Larys Frogier