Jacques Lacomblez was born in Brussels in 1934. Self-taught in all the artistic practices he pursued, he developed a multimedia corpus of drawings, paintings, and poetry, all in the surrealist realm. This is partially explained by a fascination for German Romanticism, which Lacomblez encountered at the age of 15 and which led the young artist to explore the music of Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler, the Symbolism of Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud, the politics of Karl Marx, the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and the elusive knowledge of oriental cultures. This period coincides with his first paintings, inspired by the discoveries of Giorgio De Chirico, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian.
On the poetry front, after the early influence of Jacques Prévert, the discovery of André Breton and automatic writing marked a turning point and a breakthrough, though the influence of more local Belgian referents like Maeterlinck continued to shine through. He was first published by L’Empreinte et la Nuit editions.
The 1950s were an important decade for Lacomblez. In 1952, he enjoyed his first exhibition at the Galerie Saint-Laurent in Brussels, a place known for spotting new talent. Within a few years, he met the seminal figure of Belgian surrealism, René Magritte, and began to frequent poets in the same field, such as E. L. T. Mesens, Achille Chavée, Marcel Havrenne, Marcel Lecomte and Paul Nougé. In 1956, he met the man behind the periodical Phases, Edouard Jaguer, and got involved with expansion initiatives in the Americas and across Europe, a collaboration that lasted until 1966. During the same period, Lacomblez created his own magazine, entitled Edda, which ran from 1958 to 1965, with a total of five issues.
After meeting André Breton in 1958, Lacomblez settled for a year in Cathar country in south-western France, where he cemented friendships with Jean Thiercelin, Adrien Dax and Christian d’Orgeix. His positioning between Brussels and Paris allowed him to partake in the most significant moments of international surrealist painting and poetry.
In 1955, he took part in an exhibition at the Fine Art Museum of Liège entitled L’Apport wallon au surréalisme. In 1959, he was part of the Mostra Internazionale del Surrealismo show organised by Galleria Schwarz in Milan. In 1961, his work was shown in New York for the Le Domaine des enchanteurs show at the D’Arcy Gallery. In 1964, the Fine Arts Palace of Brussels organised a comprehensive show in honour of his 30th birthday. The following year, he was in Paris for the Exposition des Surréalistes. In 1980, he enjoyed his first retrospectivess in Poland, specifically Poznañ and Warsaw. A similar exhibition was held at the Ixelles Arts Museum in Brussels in 1983. To celebrate 60 years of artistic practice, the Art and History Museum of Saint-Brieuc (Brittany) organised a retrospective in 2009. In 2014, to mark Lacomblez’s 80th birthday, the Quadri Gallery in Brussels organised a retrospective of his work entitled Images de 1951 à 2013, accompanied by a monograph.
An anthology of his poems is published under the title ‘D’Ailleurs le désir’ by Les Éditions Les Hauts-Fonds (Brest).
