Jazz and Surrealism.

At first glance: an unlikely duet.

But listen closely, and you’ll hear it.

Not just in the syncopation of notes, or the glissando of melted logic,

but in the way both refuse the ordinary,

in the way they make room for the irrational, the embodied, the dream.

 

As Ted Joans, jazz poet, surrealist, trumpet carrier of the subconscious, once declared:

“Jazz is my religion. Surrealism my point of view.”

This exhibition begins precisely there.

 

The Sky Under the Bed unfolds like a nocturne on loop,

a constellation of works that breathe, pulse, scratch, seduce.

Sculptures inflate but do not exhale.

Couch cushions become rafts in a sea.

Digital avatars sit proud and still in waxen tombs of status and sorrow.

 

The artists, Mike Pelletier, Salomé Sperling (Espace Aygo), and Benjamin Pompe, each bring their own frequency to the exhibition.

Their works are memories,

loops, licks, laments.

They stretch the surreal into the now,

reminding us that the unconscious is not a relic of the past

but a language we still speak
 

This exhibition is a prelude,

a first step in a longer curatorial research into the evolving relationship between Surrealism and jazz.

 

In the creative crucibles of the 1920s, two radical forms were born:

Surrealist art and jazz.

Dream-logic and syncopation, rupture and flow,

both sought to unseat the rational and illuminate the inner world.

One conjured apparitions in paint; the other, in sound.

And yet, both danced with the subconscious, both chased the unnameable.

 

From 1920s Paris to the Harlem Renaissance,

from the broken meter of 1960s free jazz to today’s multimedia improvisations,

this duet continues, reborn, distorted, remixed.

Rhythm becomes image. Image becomes score.

And in that crossing, we glimpse something raw, unruly, alive.

 

What do our inner worlds sound like today?

What do they look like?

And what happens when rhythm meets reverie,

when the surreal takes the stage?

​

Curator: Yev Kravt 

Exhibition Designer: Edith Gruson
Poster Deisgn: Angeriki
Team: Billy Leliveld, Mats Veen TinTin Hadders, Jaqueline le Blue