Rylsee

2024

Playful and teeming with details, the street art poster by Geneva artist Rylsee captures the excitement of a wild night at the Montreux Jazz Festival. In nearly 60 years of Montreux posters, Rylsee is the first to focus his work on the festivalgoers and how this grand popular celebration takes over the city.

Rylsee has imagined his own Festival architecture, articulated around the initials “MJF,” cleverly giving rise to stages, balconies, terraces, and stairs. Upon closer inspection, you’ll find the iconic imagery of Montreux – its lake, quays, palaces, and palm trees – and hundreds of festivalgoers and just as many whimsical adventures. In a “Where’s Waldo” fashion, Rylsee has populated his poster with scenes from the daily life of the Festival, whether festive, romantic, familial, amusing, hallucinatory, or even a bit subversive.

“I have always loved drawing imaginary cities and inventing stories for them. This is what I wanted to apply to the Festival’s image. What one remembers from an evening in Montreux is the music, but it’s also and above all the moments of sharing and celebration, the encounters, the laughter, or even the tears. I wanted to illustrate this popular, lively, and human aspect.” – Rylsee