John M Armleder

John M Armleder Poster 2008 Montreux Jazz Festival
John M Armleder © Annik Wetter

2008

At Pierre Keller‘s suggestion, once again an international star of contemporary art is given carte blanche to design the festival’s poster. Geneva artist John M Armleder combines a kinetic patterned wallpaper-like graphic composition with a photo of three trumpet mutes. Volume and levelling effects. The brightness of the brass and the mattness of the background. The visual is a formal play on repetition and distinction that resonates with experiments in contemporary music. Armleder made his name in the 1970s with his Ecart Performance Group, which organised happenings and ran a gallery and tea room in Geneva. The whole artistic avant-garde of that time met there. Solo, the artist explores the formal vocabulary of abstraction in a resolutely non-transcendent, ironic and nonchalant relationship that can refer to the everyday and the domestic.