Ernest Breleur

Ernest Breleur was born in 1945 in Martinique. He lives and works in Martinique.

Nowadays, Ernest Breleur is a major figure in contemporary art in the Caribbean and internationally. His work is displayed at important exhibits such as the recent Caribean : Crossroad of the word at the Queens Museum of Art de New York, 2012-2013, or again: Escault, Rives dérives, international festival of contemporary sculpture, 2011.

A prolific and very committed painter, he co-created the group Fwomajé, which definitely influenced the artistic field in Martinique. With a body of work built from the concept of crossroads between Africa, America, Europe and India, Ernest then chose Africa as the initial element to borrow from some modes of representation. A few years later, he left the group, finding this Africa too difficult to recognize and too remote to be fully grasped. Not knowing it fully enough, his works were only evoking an imaginary Africa that he could only dream of. He equally understood that the finality of the artistic creation isn’t the illustration of the identity, let alone its essential basis, but is going forward a contemporary expression looking for artistic opening.

Still concerned by painting at the time, he got rid of the constraints of representation imposed by the fwomajé’s project. This turning point is the symbol of a new fundamental posture. With a certain freedom, he will go to produce, among other works, the « Série Noire », « Série Mythologie de la lune » as well as some floating bodies with the goal to enter modernity. This is when he will question the metaphysical concepts of life and death.

In 1992, he creates his last paintings and definitively departs from this medium. It’s exactly at that time that his career would take a new turn. It’s with a new « available material» that he will now work: radiographs. This material would allow him to establish his artist’s singularity by questioning his place and the places in the world. In a new workshop, equipped with medical tools and material recovered from an abandoned hospital. The artist fills himself with new ideas …
This new material irremediably causes intimacy with the body. A body revealed through imagery made possible thanks to the x-rays. Ernest Breleur intervenes on the interiority of an irradiated body; he intervenes on the back of the skin.

It’s has already been over 28 years that the artist uses radiography and to this day he’s far from having ceased all the possibilities it offers. Ernest Breleur tirelessly interrogates it.
Ernest Breleur believes that by going towards the other shores of the world, he can better perceive his.

His current work went to new artistic solutions and new forms. For the artist, if the work is meaningful, the aesthetic and ethical questions are fundamental in relation with the violence of globalization.
Enriched by his contacts with Edouard Glissant, Patrick Chamoiseau, Milan Kundera and many others, after the gallery « Les Filles du Calvaire », the artist now exhibits at « Maëlle Galerie » fifteen brand new works marking a turning point in his artistic practice.