Belgian artist on designing Leonard Cohen’s last album cover

Sammy Slabbinck started making found-photo collages in 2009 using vintage copies of fashion and entertainment magazines. Juxtaposing the images, he confuses observers with absurd incongruities, forcing them to view the images from a wholly new perspective.

With the clear influence of Magritte, a touch of Monty Python and a taste for retro design, Slabbinck’s collages offer an escape to a more whimsical world. More recently, spurred by his growing influence on social media, his art has appeared in stop-motion animated films.

Then last spring, British band Coldplay’s “Up&Up” music video was released. “I started to receive congratulations from different people on social media,” Slabbinck says. The reactions were not surprising, since the video was clearly inspired by Slabbinck’s work.

Of course, Slabbinck, 39, is not the only person in the world experimenting with this retro-collage style. But that image of a bowl of soup becoming a swimming pool can only have been inspired by him.

“It’s all about ideas and taking things out of their context,” he says. “This Coldplay director just gathered a few of the best ideas around in a music video. When I contacted him, he admitted it was his interpretation of my idea. I told him copying is not the same as creating.”

‘You want it darker’

Learning from the experience, Slabbinck realised the power of social media – including Instagram and Tumblr, which serve as his online portfolio – in spreading his work around. In the art world, he says, you always have to be ahead of the rest. “A picture on a computer doesn’t take you anywhere; it’s all about the ideas.”

A few months ago, he noticed a new follower on Instagram. Behind the alias Commandercohen was Adam Cohen, the son of the late music legend Leonard Cohen.

Slabbinck promptly sent him a message, explaining that he is a big fan of both of them. Some days later came a friendly reply, followed by another message. “‘By the way, we are recording my father’s new album, and we are looking for someone to design the cover’,” Slabbinck recalls him saying. “They asked if I’d be interested.”

Obviously he was, and Slabbinck soon received a photo, taken with Adam’s iPhone, that depicted Leonard Cohen lounging with a cigarette outside his villa in Los Angeles. “They only sent that one image, with a request that I make a cover out of it.”

Following Cohen’s death on 7 November, less than three weeks after the release of You Want It Darker, the design request gained a deeper meaning. “You know, when I saw his Belgian comeback show in Bruges, and later on, one of his performances on Sint-Pietersplein in Ghent, he was still a fit man in his 70s,” Slabbinck says. “But when I was designing the artwork, I received four video messages from Leonard, in which he told me more about the album. I could see that he’d got older. On the title track, he sings ‘I’m ready, my Lord,’ as if he’d made peace with himself.”

Back to his roots

Where did the idea for the album cover come from? “I made several designs, but it was the very first one that Adam and Leonard were most enthusiastic about,” says Slabbinck. “You can see this white frame as a window to the world, or as a photo, in which the singer looks back on his life, with poetic nostalgia.”

The contrast between black and white, Slabbinck adds, refers not only to the album’s title, but Cohen’s own life. In a lyric video the Flemish artist made later for the title track, he uses the image of the frame again.

Working with the Cohens was not the first time that Slabbinck has designed a record sleeve, and it will not be the last. He’s already been approached by Adam to do the artwork for his latest album, due for release next spring.

“I like doing this a lot,” he says. “In these iTunes- and Spotify-driven times, a video or an album cover can help construct and establish the identity of a band or an artist. I’m really happy that You Want It Darker is also released on vinyl.”

Adding still images to music brings Slabbinck’s career full circle. “I started collecting vintage magazines from a very young age, but, initially, I didn’t do very much with them. When I began making CD compilations of my favourite tunes, I wanted them to have their own sleeves. So I started designing them, as if they would be sold in record stores.”