Basic Info
Name: José Bréval
Country of Origin: FR
Description
Born to a Polish mother and to a father who was an electrician, French artist José Bréval graduated in 1970 as an engineer in electronics and information technology.
Before graduating, he developed an interest in art after having visited the exhibition Lumière et Mouvement organised by Franck Popper at the Museum of Modern Art of Paris in 1967.
He started his artistic career as an autodidact in 1968 when he created his first works with Michel Bugaud, a French computer artist (1). One of his creations which resulted from this collaboration, is Parallel Networks a multitude of grid drawings systematically designed with the CDC 6600, the biggest and fastest computer in the world at the time (25 000 times less powerful than today’s iPhone 5S!).
He then realised that his drawings looked similar to some other artists’. He thus started to focus his work on systems studying the “similarity’ and the “difference’’ which gave him a broad range of possibilities since similarities and differences can be found everywhere, may it be in static shapes or objects or in time-based phenomena or processes.
Until now, with this concept in mind, he has realised, and continues realising many projects with different systems and different media providing that their combination contributed efficiently in revealing the system used.
In 1969, he met François Morellet (2) and has collaborated with him in designing and making neon control systems ever since. Beyond this collaboration, a long and deep friendship and a close complicity arose based on a shared vision of both art and life. A vision in which all of Dada’s spirit, irony, humour and derision combine with the rigour of systems and their rules (3).
Since 1974, he has been participating in exhibitions all around Europe and the United States.
In 1976 he became a member of the International Workgroup for Systematic and Constructive Art founded in Antwerp in 1972 by Pierre de Poortere and Hans Dieter Schrader.
Technology-wise, José Bréval has held different management positions within Capgemini from 1985 to 2004, and was the General Manager of Capgemini Innovation for 7 years. He founded Sipelia in 2004, an information technology-based consulting firm focused on human and machine to machine multimedia interface and video.
Like the two twisted strands of his DNA, Art and Technology continuously interact with designing and the making of drawings, paintings, sculptures, jewellery, photos, installations and other projects at the heart of which a simple ‘’system’’ is always nestling.
