AB-CC-1971-007 — World-Bearer (1971)

Technical information

Title : World-Bearer
Date : 1971
Technique : Oil on canvas
Dimensions : Unknown
Location : Private collection

Biographical / historical context

In the second half of 1971, the CC sequence opens onto a colder, more spatial register: blues, dark greens and blacks cease to be mere counter‑tones and become a true medium, almost cosmic. World‑Bearer marks this shift. The canvas remains traversed by organicist logics—stringy figures, embryonic forms—but space deepens, darkens, and the painting begins to think the living as a microcosm lodged within a form. The motif of a world contained and incubated announces the explorations of 1972 while retaining the fragility of a transitional moment.

Formal / stylistic description

In a pictorial night of deep blues, dark greens and blacks, a central figure emerges—slender and translucent, a pale green tending toward blue. Its skull takes the shape of a large diaphanous sphere, set like a globe; within it, tiny serpentine entities can be glimpsed, like an embryonic people held in transparency. The figure’s hands frame the sphere with a gesture of support and protection, at once delicate and almost technical, as if stabilizing a living nucleus. Around it, floating silhouettes, suspended heads and filaments appear and dissolve into the darkness, indicating a double level of reality between the nocturnal outside and a clearer inside. A denser band at the bottom functions as a membranous base: forms emerge there at the threshold of visibility, retaining a memory of the earlier organic vocabulary while already sinking into cosmic space.

Comparative analysis / related works

Through its cool dominance and its sense of weightlessness, the work is closer to the researches of 1972 than to the red CC canvases of early 1971. However, the central figure retains a stringy anatomy and an incubation logic that still prolong the organic. Here the sphere is no longer a simple cell: it becomes a contained world, a device of internal gravitation. This transformation of the cellular motif into a spatial microcosm makes the painting a threshold, where nocturnal depth begins to prevail over the warm matrix without that matrix disappearing entirely.

Justification of dating and attribution

The attribution to 1971 is supported by the balance between the fading of reds and the absence of the full blue saturation characteristic of 1972. The green‑yellow translucent forms, the organicism of the peripheral silhouettes and the retention of a membranous base tie the work to late 1971, while the expansion of blue‑black as a medium immediately announces the following year. The ensemble firmly situates the painting in a transition zone, consistent with an attribution to c. 1971.