Siluetas

About

“Siluetas”

Joachim Lambrechts

12 November – 18 December 2021

Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, 2 Melior Place, Bermondsey

Private View: Thursday 11th November, from 6:30 – 9 pm

A skull smoking a cigarette, an oversized duck laying an egg, and a smiling butterfly. These are the eccentric visions of Belgian artist Joachim Lambrechts who plays with composition and form to evoke a sense of childlike joy and spontaneity. While the artist typically employs a vibrant colour palette, his latest solo exhibition at Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, entitled Siluetas, presents a bold new series of textural, monochromatic works, marking a new found confidence and aesthetic purity.

Lambrechts’ practice embraces and celebrates free creative expression. He never plans his compositions, instead preferring to allow the image to reveal itself through the act of mark-making. Although this new series of black and white paintings expresses a certain restraint, the images retain a powerful sense of dynamism which reflects the artist’s spontaneous process. With these works, he began by pasting pieces of coloured paper onto the canvas to create a sense of texture and depth before applying layers of black paint. Wide brush strokes and lines of white paint were then used to delineate the outlines of objects and animals so that from a distance they appear as silhouettes or shadows, while closer inspection reveals flashes of colour breaking through the surface where the artist has scratched or scraped away the paint. This creates a palpable tension between mark making and erasure, movement and stillness, artistic abandon and creative control.

For this latest body of work, Lambrechts took inspiration from early cave paintings which despite their simplistic style convey complex narratives and emotions. In a similar way, the artist has deliberately restricted his use of lines to what is only absolutely necessary to convey a certain shape or form. The painting Pantera Negra, for example, depicts a black cat (or panther) whose body mainly consists of a large black shape with four vertical lines indicating the outlines of its front legs. Here, as with all of the artworks, Lambrechts’ signature graphical style, simultaneously clarifies and distorts our understanding of the image. The cat’s shape appears both childlike and surreal just as in the painting Pegasus we are able to immediately identify the mythical horse while viewing the creature from a seemingly impossible perspective: all four of its legs appear along the same line, bent and twisted into unnatural angles. “For me, painting is not so much wanting to convey a message, but rather a search for shapes, lines and color and seeing what possibilities they offer me,” explains Lambrechts. At the same time, this approach invites the viewer to engage on a more imaginative level as we are given a greater freedom to interpret the compositions.

With some of the works, the artist guides or destabilises our interpretation by also incorporating text into the image. At times, the words act as direct visual labels, such as Black Eagle or Lions, while others appear as witty modern-day aphorisms. The painting When the owl wakes up at night to kill, we sleep, for example, depicts an owl seemingly in a kind of trance state, its eyes filled with white circles and its wings extended while the text forms a literal frame or border around the edge of the canvas. In this way, Lambrechts questions his own role as an image-maker by demonstrating how our understanding of an artwork is shaped by not only the composition itself but also, by its framing and external contexts such as titles, accompanying text and the surroundings in which the work appears. At the same time, however, he draws us closer to the image by inviting us to us to engage more actively and intimately with the artistic process.

These complex embedded layers of tension and bold visual contrasts are what make the artworks so compelling. They are, by the very nature of paint, static scenes while simultaneously bursting with raw, exuberant creativity.

About Joachim Lambrechts

Joachim Lambrechts (born in 1986) is a renowned urban artist from Antwerp, Belgium. In 2001 he began his studies at an art school in Antwerp. Later he got very involved with the graffiti and street art scene in his home city and in 2004 he distanced himself from his academic education and left art school without graduating. In the years that followed, Joachim spent a lot of time experimenting with various approaches to graffiti and became quickly integrated into the Belgian street art scene. Since 2010, painting on canvas has been Joachim’s main focus in addition to creating street art across Europe. In contrast to his murals, Joachim never makes preliminary studies or sketches when he starts working on a canvas. Paradoxically, he feels freer within the four walls of his studio which is reflected in his paintings. They are the result of a more spontaneous process, and as such, possess a sense of urgency and innocence.

Solo exhibitions include Allegro, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Berlin (2021); On the Spur of the Moment, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London (2020); 223 DAYS, Verbeeck Van Dyck Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium (2019); BORN TO PAINT, Graffitistreet, London, UK (2018); TILL DEATH DO US ‘ART’, Huberty & Breyne Gallery, Brussels, Belgium (2017).

Group exhibitions include Facing the Sun, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Schloss Görne, Germany (2021); THIS IS NOT A ZOO, Permanent & travelling exhibition, Canary Islands, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain (2019); STREET MASTERS 2, Art Gallery, Knokke, Belgium (2018); UNDER BRIDGE GROUP SHOW, Styleconception, Innsbruck, Austria (2018); STREET MASTERS 1, Art Gallery, Knokke, Belgium (2017).

Highlights and Collections

His work is held in international private and public collections, including the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection (US).

About Kristin Hjellegjerde

Established in 2012, Kristin Hjellegjerde quickly gained recognition as an international gallery dedicated to exhibiting innovative, international artists. Known for its multicultural curatorial approach, the gallery has fostered close and cooperative relationships with museums and curators worldwide.

Drawing on her own international background, Kristin Hjellegjerde seeks to discover new talents by creating a platform through which they can be exposed to local and international clients.