Maude Léonard-Contant (*1979) is a very special kind of landscape designer. For her Kabinett exhibition No Edit Can Fail Tint she has transformed nine tonnes of reddish-brown moulding sand into a poetic language-landscape: Haiku-style poems written by the artist and pressed into the sand as negative forms; water that the oily surface resists; and empty ceramic vessels complete the ensemble and alter the topography. What emerges is an image of a desert landscape, a landscape reminiscent of human life that has been swallowed up by the desert, or of the remains of earlier civilizations and found pieces of writing, the language of which is unknown to us and therefore seems mysterious.

The artist Maude Léonard-Contant hails from Quebec and lives and works in Basel. Language and its outward appearance are central to this artist’s work. In her room installation signs become objects, the materiality of which is to be grasped, whereby language is always positioned on the borderline to the comprehensible. Despite the emphasis on the haptic quality of script, this interior can only be viewed from outside and not entered into. As if our perspective on language determined our access to reality.

Maude Léonard-Contant won the 2019 Prize of the Kunstgesellschaft Luzern, which is linked with a Kabinett exhibition the following year.