Just in time for Christmas 2025, we decided to feature an ARTE performance that transcends conventional concert formats. Babx & Adrien Mondot present Piano Piano, a multidisciplinary project that combines live music, visual art, digital projection, and performative gestures into an immersive experience.
Conceived and performed by French pianist and composer Babx and visual alchemist Adrien Mondot, Piano Piano is neither a traditional concert nor a conventional stage show. Rather, it occupies a space between sound and image, evoking a dreamlike dialogue between the senses.
In the spirit of Christmas, this essay wanders through the performance’s artistic landscape, pausing to consider the distinctive voices of Babx and Adrien Mondot, and reflecting on how their collaboration transforms music and visual expression into a shared space of wonder and quiet enchantment.
Babx & Adrien Mondot: Piano Piano
Available until 08/01/2027
A House with a Piano Inside
David Babin (Babx)
Born David Babin, Babx is an established French musician, composer, pianist, singer-songwriter, and producer. Over the years, he has carved out a distinctive place in the contemporary music scene, drawing from chanson française, jazz, and modern composition to craft works marked by lyrical sensitivity and expressive nuance.
His early career saw him rise to prominence with albums that combined poetic storytelling with musical exploration, and this dual identity as both a songwriter and instrumentalist has continued to evolve.
While audiences primarily know him for his vocal work and richly textured albums, Piano Piano showcases a different facet of his artistry. In this performance, Babx performs an entirely instrumental program drawn from his 2023 album Une maison avec un piano dedans (A House with a Piano Inside).
Freed from lyrics and narrative structure, his playing becomes a vessel for abstraction, mood, and emotion. The music in Piano Piano unfolds with an organic, contemplative quality. Each phrase is deliberate yet fluid, often conjuring imagery that seems to respond naturally to the shifting visual landscapes projected around him.
Without the need for words, his piano becomes both storyteller and companion to the audience’s imagination.
The Visual Counterpoint
Adrien Mondot
In contrast to Babx’s musical roots, Adrien Mondot operates at the intersection of digital art, performance, and physical gesture. An artist whose work defies easy categorisation, Mondot has become known for creating experiences that merge technology with the human body and for treating light and motion as artistic materials in their own right.
His projects often involve real-time visual generation, projection, and interactive elements that position the viewer, or the performer, within an evolving artistic field rather than in passive observation.
Mondot’s approach in Piano Piano is emblematic of this ethos. Rather than merely providing background visuals for the music, he creates a dynamically responsive environment in which live projection, digital forms, and sometimes juggling gestures form an expressive counterpoint to Babx’s piano.
One striking aspect of Mondot’s contribution is how he conceptualises space and movement. As a multidisciplinary creator, he treats the stage as a canvas on which digital phenomena interact with acoustic sound.
In essence, he creates a visual poetry that resonates with the musical content, making abstract notions like silence, vibration, or resonance visual and physical.
The Art of Encounter
At its core, Piano Piano is a piece about the encounter of two artistic minds, two creative sensibilities, and ultimately two modes of perception. According to program notes and descriptions, Babx and Mondot first met in the early 2000s at Délirium, an artistic space in Avignon where imagination and experimentation were encouraged.
Although their paths diverged over the years, the impulse behind Piano Piano emerges from a desire to revisit that original sense of wonder and creative freedom. In Piano Piano, the piano itself becomes a central figure, both sonically and visually.
Babx’s playing anchors the work, providing a temporal and emotional framework upon which Mondot’s visual creations can dance and evolve. The stage becomes an environment where sound and image are inseparable, moving between abstraction and impression.
Rather than synchronising visuals to pre-determined cues, Mondot’s imagery seems to respond to the music’s organic development, creating a reciprocal relationship. Notes transform into light streaks, and silences take shape as visual pauses.
While the performance is deeply rooted in its technical innovation, its aesthetic impact is ultimately human as the visual forms invite interpretation and emotional engagement.
Reclaiming Time
Babx & Adrien Mondot-Piano Piano is a convergence of artistic languages that invites the audience into a shared space of immersion and reflection. Babx’s contribution reveals the expressive power of sound in its purest form, while Mondot’s visual design reframes perception, allowing light and motion to speak as eloquently as music.
In an age where attention is often fragmented, Piano Piano challenges audiences to slow down “piano, piano,” to listen, to see, and to feel. The boundaries between disciplines are permeable, and meaning often emerges from the interplay of sensory experience.
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