William Breen captures a suspended moment of animation in his paintings which represent the urban mindspace; a place where at first glimpse is balanced and ordered but also has a brooding quality that promises a moment of significance.

His works represent his interest in the space between painting and photography. They have a super real quality that reflects the way he sees the world psychologically, emotionally, spritually and intellectually.

Flinders Lane Gallery first exhibited Breen’s paintings in 2000. The positive response to his paintings has resulted in four successive sell-out solo exhibitions at the gallery. Breen has also been selected several times as a finalist including most recently in 2006 the Geelong Art Prize and the Fleurieu Peninsula Biennale Art Prize. His paintings can be found in several important collections, including Artbank, National Australia Bank, Loyola College, La Trobe University, Whitehorse City and the Smorgan Collection.

The images echo a state of suspended animation, when everything slows down to a point where one can appreciate the contemplative nature of a world in balance, a world where everything is in its right place: an ideal vision.

Although each painting is an intuitive "moment of clarity", there is also a nostalgic quality, a half remembered past. The scenes are suspended in time and space in an emotive architectural landscape. Bathed in a diffused atmospheric light, the meditative nature of the urban image transcends the banal or familiar, into something sublime.
WILLIAM BREEN 2005