Technical information
- Title : Descent into Hell
- Date : 1971
- Technique : Oil on canvas
- Dimensions : 116 × 89 cm
- Location : Unknown
Biographical / historical context
In 1971, Breuillaud moves through a phase of instability in which the organic universe of preceding years comes undone in favor of a more spectral imagination—characteristic of the first developments of the CC cycle.
Descent into Hell belongs to this hinge moment: warm matter remains dominant, yet bodies stretch, twist, and double, as if subjected to a vertical force that imposes its own drama.
The canvas thus assumes a quasi‑mythic dimension—not through explicit narration, but through the construction of a space of fall and suction in which beings become the vectors of opposing energies.
Formal / stylistic description
The entire composition is governed by a taut verticality: elongated silhouettes, limbs turned into lianas, flame‑bodies that rise or collapse, passing through a dense red‑orange bath.
This red is no longer a compact magma; it functions as an incandescent atmosphere in which forms dissolve and recompose. Pale, almost milky figures emerge like frayed flesh, while darker zones carve cavities and open passages.
Faces—sometimes reduced to a wandering eye or to a barely indicated profile—heighten the impression of a world in mutation.
Light does not illuminate the space; it passes through the bodies, rendering them membranous, while a fine black line fixes only a few edges—like the fragile skeleton of a scene in perpetual degradation.
Comparative analysis / related works
By its warm intensity and vertical energy, the painting is close to the period’s most dramatic compositions, yet it differs through the dominance of an ascending/descending axis and the absence of a circular device.
It naturally dialogues with Tapestry of the Demonic (1971): the same red matrix and the same proliferation, but here the movement tightens into a column of fall, and the reading becomes more liturgical than centrifugal.
The multiplication of figurative knots and the distortion of bodies directly anticipate the investigations of 1972, when the living detaches more fully from the ground to become apparition and flow.
Justification of dating and attribution
The formal characteristics place the work securely in 1971: elongated silhouettes that are more graphic than the masses of 1969–1970; a lighter modelling; red still dominant, yet made more breathable through transparencies and incursions of cool tonalities.
The dissociation of the body—independent limbs, fused faces, scattered eyes—corresponds to the first distortions that will lead to the liquid figures of the CC cycle.
The work is reproduced, dated, and titled in the Catalogue Michelle Philippon (1972), confirming the dating and attribution.
Provenance / exhibitions / publications
Catalogue Michelle Philippon (1972).
© Bruno Restout — Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud