Joachim Lambrechts: On The Sunny Side Of The Street

Miles Davis. Theolonius Monk. Chet Baker. Frank Sintra. Peggy Lee. For his latest solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Tower Bridge, Belgian artist Joachim Lambrechts pays tribute to jazz legends from throughout history. Lambrechts’ work is almost always rooted in his life experiences and childhood memories. Music, in particular, is one of his recurring themes and is closely related to the evolution of his artistic practice. Featuring all new works, On the sunny side of the street is a riotous celebration of music, movement and creativity.

 

Lambrechts began his career as a street artist, painting murals in cities across Europe. While for the last five years his practice has been confined to the canvas, his paintings continue to possess a captivating sense of spontaneous energy. He never makes sketches or studies, preferring to see what emerges through the painting process. This way of working is comparable to the improvisational techniques used in jazz and although Lambrechts admits that his love for the genre has only recently developed, he believes that listening to it in the studio has unlocked a new sense of joy and freedom in his work. We see this most clearly through the bold colours and the playfulness of the compositions. In the portrait of Bobby Haynes, for instance, he is so consumed by the music that he seems not to have noticed that his cello is literally bursting into flames. Likewise, Chet Baker appears with a shiny quiff hairstyle, a cigarette in one hand and a flaming trumpet in the other. Lambrechts’ version of an epitaph is crammed into the frame in oversized lettering, like the enthusiastic scrawl of a teenage fan: ‘The pretty boy who went wrong. Chet Baker 1929-1988. Still firing up jazz until present!’ The words, like the portrait, are playful, but they also make reference to the sad reality of Baker’s early death while also acknowledging his profound and continued influence on the genre.

 

Lambrechts’ own interest in music stems back to his teenage years when he played drums in a punk rock band. It’s a time that he still looks back on fondly, less in terms of the band’s success, than with regards to the emotional experience of playing with his friends and the rawness of making music by banging a stick against an object. As Lambrechts notes, there’s something very primal about the music that transcends cultural and social boundaries and inhabits our bodies. ‘Even the oldest human civilizations had music and what’s fascinating is that, like art, music isn’t necessary to human survival: it isn’t going to feed or clothe you but it has the power to move and connect, to create an atmosphere and emotionally transport you,’ he says.

 

While the majority of his subjects in this series have transcended the jazz genre to become universal cultural icons, such as Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong, Lambrechts also shines a light on some lesser-known musicians, such as Helen Woods, Maxine Sullivan and João Gilberto, who were each ground-breaking in their own ways. Sullivan, for example, was the first jazz musician of African-American descent to have her own radio series in the 1940s while Gilberto is known for having invented the bossa nova, a musical style that originated from samba in Brazil in the late 1950s and was influenced by jazz. As with all of the musicians throughout the series, they appear as superstars, larger-than-life characters, filling the frame of the canvas against vividly coloured backgrounds, their respective instruments shining like trophies or pieces of golden treasure. At the same time, Lambrechts’ process of layering different imagery and types of paints before scratching and scraping away at the surface to leave visible marks of erasure serves as a visual reminder of the struggle and failures that each of these musicians had to endure to make their art.

 

For Lambrechts, this is what ultimately matters more than any superficial appearance of success: the act of making. For him, like for many artists, making is always a tumultuous process but one that also brings him moments of great joy. It is that joy that he hopes to convey through these latest works, the feeling of not just literally walking, as Louis Armstrong sang, ‘on the sunny side of the street’, but also of doing the things you love – listening to music, dancing, hanging out with friends, eating good food, making and encountering art.