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The poster of the 57th Montreux Jazz Festival is signed by Guillaume Grando (SupaKitch)

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The Montreux Jazz Festival has invited the French artist Guillaume Grando, alias SupaKitch, to create the official poster for 2023. The work honours Lake Geneva, so emblematic of the Festival’s image and history. The original painting, created in relief from superimposed layers of resin, will be exhibited during the 57th edition, from 30 June to 15 July 2023.

Radical and enigmatic, the poster for the 57th Montreux Jazz Festival depicts the nighttime undulations of Lake Geneva, illuminated by the event’s lively quays. The letters of the Montreux Jazz Festival, altered by the movement of the water, seem to dance in the depths of the lake.

Lake Geneva, symbol of the Montreux Jazz Festival

Immortalized on numerous album covers, sung in the anthem “Smoke on the Water” and hosting the dives of the greatest artists every summer, Lake Geneva is emblematic of the Montreux Jazz Festival image. Yet it has rarely been represented on official posters. After Bruno Gaeng’s postcard poster (1974), Per Arnoldi’s saxophone swan (1994) and Zep’s mermaids (2005), Guillaume Grando revisits this symbol of the Montreux landscape. In the refined style that characterises his work, the multidisciplinary artist frees himself from the tourist image of Lake Geneva in order to extract the essential.

“As a passionate surfer, I spend a lot of time in the ocean observing natural phenomena, especially water: its material, its colour, its movement and its interaction with light. Like music, it’s all about waves. – Guillaume Grando

Resin, acrylic and photography: a complex process

The poster is the result of a complex process, the origin of many of Guillaume Grando’s works. On a wooden support, the French artist applied several layers of acrylic and resin, sanded and sculpted to reproduce the texture of water and its reflections in relief. Once the physical object was completed, various photographs of the work were used to form the image of the poster, to which the typography was added digitally.

The originial artwork, without typography, will be exhibited during the 57th edition of the Montreux Jazz Festival, from June 30th to July 15th 2023.

From SupaKitch to Guillaume Grando

Guillaume Grando (aka SupaKitch) is a French multidisciplinary artist with an international reputation. Born in the suburbs of Paris in 1978, he started graffiti at a very young age under the name SupaKitch. Although he draws his inspiration from natural phenomena, Guillaume Grando also cites Pierre Soulages and abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko as major influences.

Today, his formal research focuses on the essence of gesture, movement, light and matter, which become the central questions of his approach, strongly influenced by the experience of surfing, freed of all superfluous elements so that only the expression of the undulation remains.

His next exhibitions are scheduled at the Artcan Gallery in Marseille, the Cohle Gallery in Menorca and the Barthelemy Bouscayrol Gallery in Biarritz. A printed edition of one of his works will be released at the end of the year by the legendary Parisian publishing house Idem.

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