Laurent Le Bel-Roux
The Room is Listening

September 9 to October 14, 2023

Galerie Nicolas Robert is proud to present The Room is Listening, a first exhibition with Laurent Le Bel-Roux, in our Project Room. Focusing on the relationship between our senses and cognitive processes, Le Bel-Roux's recent body of work explores the transposition of sound to image. Using a spectrogram, the soundtrack of Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room is translated into a diagram, from which fragments are extracted and assembled into ghostly visual landscapes. This interchangeability of sound to the image enables him to explore the sonic characteristics of the work with an alternative sensibility to hearing and generates almost infinite possibilities for visual compositions. Not completely abandoning the auditory aspect for pictorial representation, the structure of the paintings presented is composed of soundproofing materials, influencing the very acoustic imprint of the exhibition space.
 
Laurent Le Bel-Roux holds a bachelor's degree in visual and media arts from UQAM (2021) and is the recipient of the Fond de la Faculté des Arts scholarship for excellence from the same institution. He is currently completing his MFA in Studio Art at The University of Texas at Austin. He also holds a college diploma in sound technology and has worked as a sound engineer in Montreal. His work has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions, including at Occurrence (2023), Skol (2023), Fait-moi l'art (2022), and the first edition of the Plural Art Fair with Galerie Nicolas Robert (2023). He completed a creative residency with the REDA organization in Valcourt (2022), and his work is included in numerous private collections, including Scotiabank.