Album, exhibition, novel. to see and hear the highlights from the editorial this week.
Noga Erez, pop uppercut
She is one of those rare pop singer-songwriters who displays musical knowledge with multiple horizons, a “badass” outlook and a conflicted identity. Noga Erez’s delicate beauty contrasts with the harshness of her blueswoman voice. The pastel melodies of his compositions are punctuated by electronic sound effects and old-school rap and hip-hop scans. Originating in jazz and graduating from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance, the Israeli artist releases his third album after a world tour and a visit to Madison Square Garden. Interspersed with dance beats and devastating irony, Vandalist imbued with extraordinary energy. Noga Erez’s recipe owes a lot to alt-pop, a musical style that combines pop traditions with an underground sensibility. Formed with musician Ori Russo, Vandalist combines the trip-hop sounds of British band Portishead, the disco of the 1980s and the rock of American bands such as Nirvana and Paramore. Noga Erez’s lyrics describe an alienated world, a victim of ignorance, the egotistical frivolity of social media, and the emptiness of cries for peace and love that last for a short while. Vandalist resonates like a diabolical rhythmic hymn of vengeance against the void. PG:
Vandalist Warner:
Surrealism, age of modernity
Private collection.
Before it closes for renovations in 2025, and while comics are on display on every floor, the Center Pompidou is celebrating surrealism for the publication’s centenary. ManifestBy Andre Breton, whose mantras are always relevant: “change lives” and “transform the world”. Twenty years after the exhibition Surreal revolution followed by among others Surrealism and the subject and monographs such as Dally the museum looks back at this avant-garde movement, which ended not in 1940, but in 1969, the year of its official dissolution. Adopting a maze-like scenography, the route wraps around the original manuscript; Manifesto of Surrealism(exclusive loan from the National Library of France). Educational audiovisual projection sheds light on its meaning and origins. Structured like a spiral, the exhibition, both chronological and thematic, is punctuated by thirteen chapters dedicated to the movement’s literary figures (Lautréamont, Lewis Carol, etc.) and the mythologies that build its imagination; dream…Mixing paintings, drawings, films, photographs, it presents iconic works such as Big masturbatorby Salvador Dali A child’s brainBy Giorgio de Chirico, or The big forestby Max Ernst and reflects the place of women, which has been widely revised in recent years… A popular exhibition that promises to be a blockbuster. LC:
SurrealismFrom September 4 to January 13, 2025 at the Center Pompidou in Paris. centrepompidou.fr.
The seed of rebellion
Press:
We don’t know where or when, before or after the “progress,” it’s both historical and futuristic, eschewing the usual narrative markers. A lost village, a miserable land, a cruel and sometimes fantastic peasant life, when nature becomes a miracle. Two twin sisters living side by side with their companions, two pairs as mismatched as each other. Aelis has three sons, Ambre has no children. There’s a mysterious narrator, and then a lost, hungry little girl who suddenly emerges from deep in the woods. The very place where the master’s son hunts, who not only attacks animals… This almost mute child, Ambre, will receive him in his empty house, he will be called Madeleine. A superb piece of writing to tell the story of nature in its sovereignty, revolving around a group of children who venture deeper into the woods. The magic of childhood has been cut short by the vagaries of time and bad harvests. Then opens like a second book that crashes into the first like a spear in the bark of a tree; hunger, fear when it strikes. The indescribable suffering, the tenacity of life, fear and courage to the point of incandescence. As if to remind our modernity that the issue of climate is not secondary? Madeleine and her cousins survive, grow up, learn to cultivate the land. Madeleine is happy. But fate has chosen him, he is the one who must refuse to submit, shake the order of things with an ax in his hand. The novel explores this instinct for rebellion, which takes time to take root and then emerges suddenly, no matter what the cost. Because one day everything has to change. IP:
Madeleine before dawnby Sandrine Collette, Éditions JC Lattès, 252 p., €20.90.
Source: Le Figaro
