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The year 1957 marked an important turning point in Léon Bellefleur’s aesthetic process. Notably, he used a palette knife to produce compositions that were more angular and orthogonal, with slicks of colour, tool-tip scratch marks, facets, and wave-like forms. These manipulations breathed new life into his pictorial syntax, now characterized by an overall jolting, incisive, and vibrant style. His introduction of white casts a soft glow on the overall composition as it gently nuances his enriched and ever-expanding palette. Slowly but surely, Bellefleur “broke away from the nocturnal world” in favour of a universe that was flourishing, burgeoning, like a suddenly rising sap. As Guy Robert writes, “Three works from 1957, Cimes, Capricorne, and Sycomore [reproduced on pages 82–83 of the monograph Bellefleur ou la ferveur à l’oeuvre] illustrate the scope of this shift in Bellefleur’s new paintings and their increasingly energetic composition, vivid radiance, and edgy rhythms.”