Gérard Garouste’s “Brisure” at Templon, Paris: Why a Painter Breaks Things to Find Meaning

To eat an almond, you have to crack the shell. That small, almost childish fact sits at the centre of Gérard Garouste’s “Brisure” at Templon in Paris, the French painter’s new solo exhibition at the gallery’s Grenier Saint-Lazare space, from 4 November to 30 December 2026. Its largest work, the triptych L’Amandier (The Almond Tree, 2026), is around three and a half metres wide; in the Kabbalistic tradition Garouste draws on, the almond stands for meaning that can only be reached by breaking something open.

“Brisure”: breaking as a way of reading

The French word brisure means a break or a fracture. In Templon’s press release, Garouste presents it not as damage but as a doorway: “La brisure n’est pas une fin, mais une ouverture” — the break is not an end but an opening. The idea comes from the Kabbalistic image of the “breaking of the vessels”, in which divine light shatters the containers meant to hold it. Garouste uses that myth as a model for reading: a fixed text, or a fixed form, has to be interrupted before new meaning can appear. He has called this way of working a “psychoanalysis of the text”.

Readers who know his recent work will recognise the method. “Brisure” continues two earlier projects: Zeugma (2018) and Correspondances (2021), a dialogue around Kafka made with the philosopher and rabbi Marc-Alain Ouaknin. Each time, the starting point is a text, and the painting is what happens when that text is pulled apart.

One of France’s most singular painters

Born in Paris in 1946, Gérard Garouste has worked as a painter, sculptor and stage designer since the early 1980s, when he became one of the artists who brought figurative painting back to the centre of French art. The Centre Pompidou gave him a solo exhibition in 1988 and a major retrospective in 2022, with some 120 paintings alongside sculptures, installations and graphic work. Other key exhibitions include the Fondation Cartier (2001), the Fondation Maeght (2015) and the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi (2020).

He was elected to the Académie des beaux-arts in 2017, is a commandeur of the Ordre national du Mérite and an officier of the Légion d’honneur. Beyond the studio, he co-founded the association La Source in 1991 with Élizabeth Garouste; it runs art workshops for children and young people facing social or educational difficulty. His 2009 memoir L’Intranquille, written with Judith Perrignon, gave a frank, personal account of his life and work. Templon has represented him since 2002.

Inside the exhibition

“Brisure” brings together work made over the past four years: paintings, gouaches on paper, drawings and bronze sculptures. The gallery has not published the number of works. In the paintings, bodies are stretched and twisted in Garouste’s familiar theatrical register, somewhere between the grotesque and the marvellous, with saturated colour and quick, nervous brushwork.

Beyond L’Amandier, the works named by the gallery include the gouaches Hadassa and La langue unique (both 2024–26), Les séphiroth et l’idole, and La vache rousse et les myrthes (2026), the gouache reproduced above, whose red heifer and myrtles come straight from biblical and rabbinic imagery. Some of the works on paper are being shown for the first time.

The sculptures carry the show’s most direct emotional charge. The bronze L’Arbre de Vie (2024), made in response to the attacks of 7 October 2023, shows hands rising from ruins around an olive tree, with Hebrew letters on the branches reading “Da Lifnei Mi Atah Omed” — “Know before whom you stand”, a phrase inscribed above the ark in many synagogues. A second bronze, Guer (2025), completes the sculptural group.

A book, a talk and a gallery in the Marais

The exhibition is paired with Brisure, a book by the Talmud specialist Pierre-Henry Salfati published by Flammarion. On Thursday 19 November, from 18:30 to 20:00, Garouste, Salfati and Philippe Piguet will hold a talk and book signing at the gallery — the best evening to visit if you want to hear the ideas behind the paintings from the artist himself.

Templon, founded by Daniel Templon, has two spaces in the Marais, on rue Beaubourg and rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, a few minutes’ walk from the Centre Pompidou that has twice honoured Garouste. It is fitting geography for an artist whose career has run between the commercial gallery and the national museum.

Why it matters

For painters, Garouste remains a model of how figurative painting can be intellectually ambitious without becoming illustration: the texts are the engine, but the canvases stand on colour, distortion and drawing. For collectors, a new body of work from an Academician with a recent Pompidou retrospective is a significant market moment, and the gouaches offer a more accessible way into his work than the large canvases; prices are available from the gallery. And for anyone else, “Brisure” offers a hopeful thought for difficult times: in Garouste’s telling, breaking is what frees us from the forms that hold us in.

Visiting information

Templon, 28 rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare, 75003 Paris. 4 November – 30 December 2026. Vernissage: Wednesday 4 November, 12:00–20:00. Talk and signing: Thursday 19 November, 18:30–20:00. Open Tuesday–Saturday, 10:00–19:00. Phone: +33 (0)1 85 76 55 55. Email: [email protected].

See the official exhibition page, our exhibition listing, and more Paris openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.