Sons. Analogies between Music and Painting

From 21/02/24 to 05/01/25

The Museu Carmen Thyssen Andorra is hosting its eighth exhibition entitled SOUNDS. Musical analogies in painting.

Pilar Giró, curator of the exhibition, explains:

Sound is something that accompanies us even in the deepest of silences. The incessant propagation of its waves draws the outline of the continuous movement of the universe, although our perception makes us believe in a stillness that does not exist either.

Sons is an exhibition proposal designed to decode plastic language from a sound perspective. When we establish a dialogue with painting, we are used to focus in our gaze, and through this channel, to contemplate and feel the emotions that the images arouse in us. The aim of this exhibition is to invite you to accompany the visual register with the auditory register, so that this combination is an approach to painting that allows you to listen and hear the works of art, allowing the voices, sounds and music suggested by the images and forms represented to emerge.

Thus, by looking at the painting and discovering the sonorous baptism of the soul of the pieces, the stage of the dialogue becomes the sounding board for the voices and sounds that we decide to give to the painted forms and we, the spectators of the work, become from now on the creators and actors of the new story, an open and multi-faceted story.

Following this trail of complicity in the propagation of the museographic discourse, the intentional formal eclecticism of the exhibition is in line with the previous work of the Museu Carmen Thyssen Andorra. From a polyhedral reading, looking for or enjoying the acoustic connections from the works amplifies not only the experience of the visit to the exhibition but also the gaze towards art.

Analogies of space with composition, of colour with the voice of sounds, of gesture with time, of stroke with vibrations: from the abstraction of Paternosto to the figuration of Pruna linked by white as a metaphor for the absorption of sound, passing through the tonal timbres in the chromatisms of Girona and Sanvicens, the brooch of the metropolis of Souto and González separated by a century or the movement in the dances painted by Alaux or Grau Sala as testimony to a present music.

Painting invites us to listen to the sounds of the world: the murmur of Martí i Alsina’s conversations in the port, the confidences of Barrau’s seamstresses, the vibration of Amat’s colour, the movement of Bauck’s waves, Tàpies’s uninhabited spaces or Perejaume’s flames.

Sons. Analogies between Music and Painting, from a multisensorial perspective in favour of aesthetic enjoyment, with the desire to contribute to improving the sensation of well-being, seeks to awaken acoustic emotions in order to highlight the sound universes of the pictorial space, a field traditionally approached solely from the perspective of visual contemplation.

The exhibition will be on show on the ground floor of the former Valira hostel from 21 February 2024 to 5 January 2025.