Jack Coulter hears in color. The Belfast-born painter has synaesthesia, a crossing of the senses that delivers sound to him as color, shape, and movement, and for a decade he has been turning that private signal into public canvases, painting in real time while the music plays. With Every Light and With Every Song, presented by Winsor Birch at Gallery 8 in St James's, London, is his first public exhibition in three years, and it is on view now through August 9.
The work only makes sense through the practice. Coulter, born in 1994 and raised around abstraction by way of his aunt Christine, a printmaker who steeped him in post-war Abstract Expressionism, does not illustrate songs. He documents the experience of hearing them, laying down color as it arrives, so a finished canvas functions less like an album cover and more like a seismograph reading of a piece of music passing through one specific nervous system. The results have pulled in an audience most abstract painters never reach: his collectors include Elton John, Paul McCartney, Anne Hathaway, Billie Eilish, and the Freddie Mercury Estate, and his following came the modern way, one painting at a time, posted from the studio.
The road to St James's runs through some remarkable rooms. A musical painting made for Glastonbury in 2016 traveled around the world online and put his name into circulation. In 2018 he painted Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto live on stage with the London Chamber Orchestra at Cadogan Hall. His 2022 debut solo exhibition at Sotheby's in London gathered twenty-five paintings spanning a century of listening, from the early jazz of Mary Lou Williams to Harry Styles, and a Dublin follow-up came the year after. Along the way he made a collaborative work with the late Shane MacGowan, a fellow synaesthete, titled If I Should Fall From Grace With God, two crossed sets of senses meeting on one surface.
The new exhibition arrives on the back of the most intimate session of his career. Earlier this year, in an evening arranged by David Furnish, Elton John sat at his own piano and played Tiny Dancer live while Coulter painted beside him, producing a single one-of-a-kind canvas, a song and its image made in the same span of minutes. John already owned Coulter's work, including a painting made while listening to Candle in the Wind, but this was something else entirely: the source and the response sharing a room. With Every Light and With Every Song follows directly from that performance, filling the gallery with a new body of work born the same way, color pulled straight from sound.
There is a quiet mismatch in the setting that makes the show more interesting, not less. Winsor Birch is a dealership whose walls more often hold Peter Blake and Louis le Brocquy, and placing Coulter in that lineage says plainly what the market has been circling for years: this is not an internet curiosity, it is painting. But the best argument remains the physical one. Coulter's canvases are records of listening, and standing in front of them is the closest most of us will get to borrowing his ears.
With Every Light and With Every Song is on view at Gallery 8, St James's, London through August 9, presented by Winsor Birch, with more from the artist at jackcoulter.com and on Instagram.
