The New Brutalism

Arf of the Instinct

RAW ART

& Design

MOVEMENT BY THE FRENCH ARTIST 0XEC6D0

Replacing the raw concrete with the raw white canvas. Few touches of primary colors. Instinctively working with form and lines. No overlaying of color. Black lines and patterns to break up the white. The heart and nerve of neo-expressionism without its excess.

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“Research of minimalism
and meaning
in a saturated world”

New Brutalism isn’t just a contemporary, artistic version of Brutalism. It’s a general desire to blend meaning and minimalism after two decades of neo-expressionism, led by Basquiat, setting the pace for the art market and trends.

Then came Pop Art, with its saturated, fluorescent colors, which went hand in hand with a world saturated with color, stimuli, and ever more flashy and eye-catching designs. Where the artist, as in The Voice, sought to do as much as possible with techniques, colored resins, shimmering pigments, and LEDs galore.

In this in-between, brutalism began to re-emerge, first in design with names like Le Corbusier, or Marcel Breueur who resurfaced with new interior models in tables, sofas LC2, chairs LC6 for Le Corbusier, and the chairs B3, B32, B33 and B34 for Marcel Breueur. Then later in art and UI design, notably ceramics and stoneware with artists like Frederick Gauthier with his collection for Serax, or Pascal Deville with his brutalist website.

Today, it is the anonymous French artist 0xec6d0 who is diving into neo-brutalism with his new brutalism movement: the raw side of the canvas primed with broken gesso with black lines and flat primers.

The First Six Artworks Of The New Brutalism

New Brutalism begins with six main works that gave rise to an entire movement. These first six works constitute the cornerstone of the entire movement, with a free expression of the artist 0xec6d0.

Le déjeuner sur l’herbe

In this inaugural canvas of New Brutalism, the artist asserts a clear intention: to break conventions, to deconstruct traditional pictorial languages ​​to open up a new field. He draws inspiration here from the harshness of Brutalist architecture—its stark masses, its bare surfaces, its imposing silences—which he transposes onto the canvas in a tense dialogue between rigid forms and vibrant materials.

The work is organized around flat areas of primary colors, deliberately devoid of gradations or affect, which clash or ignore each other against a raw, almost untamed background. The texture of the support becomes a full-fledged actor, summoned as a mechanical counterpoint to the spiritual and organic impulses of the composition.

Here, there’s no need for explanation: the scene refuses to tell a story. Black—by turns dense, fluid, opaque, or transparent—seales this deliberate fragmentation, like a final attempt to hold together the opposing forces of the work. Three figures emerge, without hierarchy: man turned toward the divine, nature in full bloom, and the viewer, drawn into the tumult.

With this inaugural gesture, the artist is not painting a manifesto—he is living it. This painting does not illustrate New Brutalism; it constitutes its birth certificate.

Le Couple français

Here, the artist abandons himself to a silent narrative, where words give way to the expressive power of the faces and the depth of the atmosphere. The television, present but silent, becomes a spectral icon: it broadcasts not images, but a dull tension, a contemporary echo of the inner commotion.

The canvas breathes smoke—not the kind we see, but the kind we feel: heavy, persistent, almost unbreathable. The atmosphere is dense, deliberately opaque, as if each stroke were trying to cut through a mist of unexpressed emotions.

The brushstrokes are lively, sometimes nervous, sometimes drawn out, like the contradictory beats of a pounding heart. Everything here evokes a tumult—not spectacular, but contained, telluric. The viewer is not guided: they are thrown into the middle of a scene without landmarks, where only the intensity of the stroke can serve as a compass.

This painting does not seek beauty: it seeks the naked truth, sometimes violent, always raw, brutalist. The artist does not paint an image, he extracts a tension, he tears it from the material.

le triangle amoureux

0xec6d0 explores the intimate fractures of human beings with unashamed rawness. In Le Triangle Amoureux, he dissects emotional bonds straightforwardly, without artifice: this painting is an emotional battlefield, a contemporary fresco of a couple consumed by their own contradictions.

At the heart of the composition, a love triangle unfolds—not in a theatrical setting, but amidst a latent, almost stifling tension. Ambiguity reigns supreme: nothing is clear, everything wavers. Jealousy surfaces beneath the lines, weariness permeates the material, betrayal is never far away, but never named.

The pictorial gesture is brutalist, frank, almost disillusioned. The artist refuses complacency: he addresses the troubled side of each of us, what society conceals but which the painting here silently screams. It’s not just about a couple, but about humanity—in its chaos, its flaws, its everyday lies.

The work can be suspended in one direction or the other, reversible like power relations or emotional truths. It doesn’t dictate anything; it questions. It is multiple, unstable, disturbing. It forces us to choose a point of view—while reminding us that this choice is always fragile. Raw. Brut.

lA CRÉATION D’ADAM

In this iconic work 0xec6d0 doesn’t cite La Création d’Adam: he deconstructs it. He extracts its symbolic framework to offer a radically contemporary reading, stripped of classical sacredness but imbued with a new power. Minimalist in its execution, the work is striking for the density of what it conceals as much as what it exposes.

The female figure—integrated with silent clarity—rebalances a founding myth too long monopolized by a single polarity. It is not a variation, but an extension: a way of going further, of going beyond codes, of questioning the origin not as a frozen moment but as a field of possibilities.

Everything is pared down to the bone. Every line is held, every void is significant. And yet, nothing is cold: the tension is there, palpable, contained. Pictorial brutalism asserts itself once again, not as a stylistic effect, but as a necessity.

To destroy art, here, is not to reject it: it is to force it to reinvent itself. To become dangerous again.

VÉnus

With this blue background, quite unusual in its movement, 0xec6d0 goes straight to the point—not out of economy, but out of insubordination. He strips the canvas of everything superfluous: a blue half-background, no decoration, no ornament. Only lines, movement, primary colors—posed as non-negotiable statements.

This is not an abstraction, it’s a statement. A rejection of excess, of talk, of systematic “pop.” The work stands against the visual noise of contemporary art—overly saturated, too explicit, too recomposed. Here, there’s no Venus cut out and then repainted: just a subject, naked, frontal, held by a line.

Minimalism becomes a tool of criticism. In this brutal sobriety, there is a desire to impose a vision. The artist summons a space where the viewer must stop consuming the image and start thinking about it again. The message? Perhaps there isn’t one. Or perhaps it is multiple, buried in the silences of form.

We perceive, in the background, an echo of the hallucinations of generative intelligences, those machines that produce meaning without wanting it. Here too: is there an intention? A meaning? Or is it just an illusion?

The artist doesn’t respond. He poses. He traces. He leaves doubt open—like a calm provocation, a crack in the surface.

LibertÉ

A poetic and visual echo, this painting is part of a discreet dialogue with Paul Éluard, where each stroke seems to whisper a single, vital and sovereign word: “Freedom.” Here, the artist invokes an aesthetic inherited from the Cubists, not as a formal homage, but out of a need for rupture: to deconstruct in order to better liberate.

Line takes precedence over form. The latter, deliberately fragmented, eludes any stable interpretation, inviting fluid and unfettered contemplation. The work asserts a radical, almost ascetic elegance, where each line is precisely placed to express the essence of the founding word.

Minimalist yet powerful, the composition exudes a rare purity, the kind that emerges when one removes everything that interferes with the primary emotion. Here, there is no ambiguity: just a frank, assertive, fundamental clarity.

In a simple gesture, the artist reminds us that freedom needs no overload, only space to be expressed.