2024-03-22 12:26:01
He Friday March 22thwhen he comes out to play at 7 p.m., the Argentine electronic music group Klauss will make history at the National Museum of Fine Arts. The sound laboratory led by Ernesto Romeo prepara a performance inspired by 12 paintings from the institution’s permanent collection. “I was happy when the museum invited me,” says the keyboardist and composer. “First, because since I was a child I have been a lover of the plastic arts and especially painting. My mother was a painter. And then, because the Museum is ingrained in my life. It was my only access to certain types of works until I was able to leave South America at 37 years old.”
“Contrasts and equivalences in a fleeting bridge” is the title of the sound piece that has as its starting point the impressionism. “When they made me the proposal, it occurred to me that the tour could be a musical composition that accompanied a certain development that exists in the plastic arts,” explains Romeo. “From impressionism to the ’80s of the 20th century, where there is an expressive interest in color. In some way, the emancipation of color and noise in music is taken from form. Not only as a symbolic entity but also an emotional one. It seemed to me to be a link that can be transferred from music to painting and vice versa. That the musical movement that brings together Debussy and Ravel is called impressionist, and that it has an almost literal analogy with Monet’s paintings, seemed appropriate to me.”
As Marianella Baladan advances in the curatorial text of the event organized by the Friends of Fine Arts Association, “Klauss incorporates into his future the sound and formal relationships that link painting with modern musicality and electroacoustics.” Romeo adds: “Electronic has a compositional form with many points in common with abstract art. The first two pieces that we are going to work on have to do with impressionism and post-impressionism. Then come other pieces related to abstract and geometric art, where color, shape and rhythm are closely linked to crucial aspects of electronic music and electroacoustics, but also to a certain type of electronics more linked to rock and even to music like Kraftwerk.”
Consisting of three parts, the performance has as its raw material works by authors of the transcendence of Paul Klee, Joaquin Torres Garcia, Alexander Xul Solar, Jackson Pollock, Manuel Alvarez, Jose Antonio Fernandez Muro, Alberto Greco, Ernesto Deira, Manuel Espinosa and Anselmo Piccoli. “In the section that we start with Pollock we will make a relationship between noise, manchism and grains. And how this is structured towards a new figuration, starting in the ’60s,” he also describes. producer, cultural manager and teacher. “We are going to make a link between Monet’s first painting and the first work of concrete music, by Pierre Schaeffer, which is from 1949. We will also work with samples that Isao Tomita made of works by Debussy and Ravel, with our harmonizations made with synthesizers ”.
In addition to the representation of the dialectic that was established between visual arts and electronic music, there is a question that supports the proposal: “If the works of art were pieces of music, how would they sound?” That is why the activity will also have the digital artist Maga Suescun, who will produce “a progressive moving image design based on the pictorial works of the collection that will be intervened, processed and affected by audio-reactive digital effects.” “It is an electroacoustic and audiovisual work that incorporates recordings of real sounds, concrete music resources and processed acoustic instruments. In addition to modular synthesizers,” the musician elaborates. “Maga will have things reactive to the audio signals that we will play, which accompanies this development of the musical and the audiovisual.”
As the years went by, the dialogue between electronic music and the museum as a space for the mediation of the senses and language was strengthened. That is why it is increasingly common to see figures from both the most experimental profile of the genre and the dance floor filling residencies and retrospectives not only in Argentina but also in the rest of the world. From Pablo Reche and Jorge Haro in the Casa de Yrurtia Museum in Buenos Aires to Jeff Mills in the Parisian Louvre, passing through Ryuichi Sakamoto in the Chinese M Woods. “This will be the first time that there is electronic music inside the National Museum of Fine Arts. I don’t know of any other previous record,” says Romeo, co-organizer of the Pleamar festival at the Mar del Plata Museo MAR. “That fills me with joy because it shows how prejudices are breaking down.”