Belgian painter, poet and publisher, born in 1934 in Brussels, a member of the Phases movement.
Life
Self-taught, he painted his first Surrealist-minded pictures at fifteen, after discovering Giorgio De Chirico and then Max Ernst; he also admired Kandinsky. His first exhibition took place in Brussels, at the Galerie Saint-Laurent. In the early 1950s he met René Magritte and spent time with the Belgian Surrealists E. L. T. Mesens, Achille Chavée, Marcel Lecomte and Paul Nougé.
In 1956 he met Édouard Jaguer, the driving force of the review Phases, and established the movement in Belgium; from then on he worked closely on its activities and exhibitions in Europe and the Americas. In Brussels he founded the review Edda, whose five issues appeared from 1958 to 1964, with texts by Camille Bryen, Gherasim Luca, Francis Ponge, Marcel Broodthaers and Julio Cortázar, and the publishing house L’Empreinte et la Nuit. In 1958 Jean-Jacques Lebel introduced him to André Breton. At the instigation of Breton and Marcel Lecomte, he spent a year in south-west France, notably at Montségur. He took part in the International Surrealist Exhibitions in Milan (Galleria Schwarz, 1959) and New York (D’Arcy Galleries, “Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain”, 1960-1961).
The work
A great music lover, he devoted pictorial tributes to Mahler, Sibelius, Xenakis, Feldman, Luigi Nono, Grisey and Ferneyhough, and, in jazz, to Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman. As a poet he has published in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada and the United States; an anthology of his poems, D’ailleurs le désir, edited by Alain Le Saux, was published by Les Hauts-Fonds (Brest) in 2010. He has illustrated texts by Guy Cabanel, Jorge Camacho, Édouard Jaguer and Franklin Rosemont, and published Achille Chavée.
Exhibitions and collections
- 1964: exhibition at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels; 1983: first retrospective in Belgium, Musée d’Ixelles
- 2009: retrospective at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Saint-Brieuc; 2014: “Images de 1951 à 2013”, Galerie Quadri, Brussels
- 2024: “Le surréaliste Jacques Lacomblez en mots et en images”, Bibliotheca Wittockiana, Brussels (18 October to 15 December)
- Collections: museums of modern art in Brussels, Rome, Warsaw and Poznań; Israel Museum, Jerusalem (Schwarz collection)
- At the gallery: shown in 2024 in the section “Édouard Jaguer and the international Phases movement” of the exhibition “At the Sources of Convulsive Beauty” (25 October to 30 November)