AB-CC-1971-008 — Cosmic Expansion (1971)

Technical information

Title : Cosmic Expansion
Date : 1971
Technique : Oil on canvas
Dimensions : 73 × 110 cm
Location : Private collection *

Biographical / historical context

Painted at the heart of 1971, Cosmic Expansion belongs to the moment when Breuillaud’s painting, still marked by the great red and dark matrices, begins to shift its center of gravity toward an autonomous space. After the “magma” canvases and the emergence of the sphere‑bearer motif, the organic ceases to be merely a matter of implosion: it becomes the starting point of an extension, as if the pictorial universe were lifting off the ground to float.

The work thus occupies a pivotal position: it preserves the idea of a generating focus, yet unfolds its consequences within a blue depth where the sensation of weight dissolves. This passage directly anticipates the cosmo‑cellular constructions that will stabilize in 1972, when cool color and the notion of milieu become structural principles.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition is dominated by a vast translucent sphere, slightly off‑center to the right, whose turquoise, milky membrane envelops a network of inner forms. Inside, filament‑like figures—both human and undecidable—can be sensed like silhouettes in gestation: an elongated body, supple limbs, heads reduced to luminous nuclei, caught in a circulation of curves and counter‑curves.

The background, a deep blue modulated by muted greens, does not function as décor. It acts as a substance: dark layers, diffuse halos, zones of absorption and emergence construct a depth of black water, where other softened globes appear at the edges like satellites. Filaments and membranous extensions link these pockets of light, suggesting an organic continuity across the scale of the painting.

Paint alternates between glazes and denser reworkings, giving the central sphere the quality of a breathing volume. Contours remain permeable: nothing is sealed, and the form seems to constitute itself in the same movement that dissolves it. This controlled hesitation between appearance and erasure makes the image less a scene than the record of a state—of a world in the process of defining itself.

Comparative analysis / related works

Compared with the 1971 canvases dominated by verticality and magmatic tumult, Cosmic Expansion tempers the violence of gesture in favor of a slow, circulatory expansion. The vertical thrust becomes a floating gravity, and the pictorial field opens in depth rather than in fall or ascent.

The spherical motif, already present in neighboring works, takes on a structuring function here: no longer an object carried or looming above, but a true milieu of formation in which beings distribute and transform. This logic anticipates the first “geneses” of 1972—particularly compositions centered on a radiant nucleus—while retaining a share of indeterminacy inherited from 1971.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1971 dating accords with the visible stylistic tension: the work retains remnants of organic density and dark zones typical of the CC phase, while for the first time asserting a dominance of blue‑green as an autonomous medium. The presence of a large membranous sphere, the lightening of figures into filaments and the disappearance of explicit bodily narration place the canvas in this turning point, immediately before the cosmo‑cellular clarification of 1972. The attribution is confirmed by Breuillaud’s distinct plastic signature: nervous lines, the hybridization of the biological and the cosmic, and the construction of an interior space without horizon.