Technical information
- Title : Ascent of Fire
- Date : 1974
- Technique : Oil on canvas
- Dimensions : 73 × 100 cm
- Location : Unknown
Biographical / historical context
In 1974, André Breuillaud pushes chromatic intensity to an extreme threshold: red-orange becomes less a “background” than an incandescent medium, like an atmosphere heated to white-hot. Ascent of Fire belongs to a series in which matter seems in fusion and forms emerge from an inner magma—a movement initiated as early as late 1973 in certain red papers and fully developed in 1974 in large-format canvases.
In this “incandescent rubra” branch of the corpus, the artist abandons the idea of a represented space in order to install an autonomous thermal field. The canvas organises a vertical thrust, an energetic dilation, as if the image recorded the release of buried forces rather than a figurative scene.
Formal / stylistic description
The composition is structured by a central ascending form, black-brown and seemingly carbonised, traversed by lighter veins and crossed by filaments that rise, split, and fade. This column is neither a trunk nor a volcano in a descriptive sense: it functions as an axis of ascent, a vector of energy that draws the entire surface upward.
Around this axis, two lateral masses act as organic extensions. On the left, a fleshier, more supple proliferation in yellow-browns mingles limbs and cavities from which isolated eyes emerge. On the right, a large dark form, taut like a scorched membrane, opens into a wing and carries nervous offshoots, likewise punctuated by ocular signs. The whole suggests a fragmented organism in torsion, whose parts answer one another like the “arms” of an inner fire.
The saturated red ground abolishes all perspective: no horizon, no air—only a heated matter in which the slightest shift in transparency becomes vibration. Line, nervous and fluid, slips from one zone to another through fine transitions; the handling combines glazes over the red field with denser passages in the dark areas, reinforcing the sense of incandescence and contraction at once.
Traces of anthropomorphism appear in fragments—eyes without heads, residual mouths, embryonic silhouettes—but they never assemble into characters: they surface like accidents of fusion, signs of a human presence dissolved within the thermal flow.
Comparative analysis / related works
Within the 1974 corpus, the canvas is close to Nexus rubra in its internal tension and its sense of concentrated energy, but Ascent of Fire intensifies the dynamic of rising, less tied to a central knot than to a continuous vertical push. By contrast, Noctis membrana explores a different chromatic register while sharing the same logic of entities dissolved within an autonomous medium where space is no longer “represented”.
A comparison with Erotic Entanglement (1974) clarifies a shift: the fusion of forms is present in both, but here the fusion is thermal and eruptive rather than pastel and amniotic. Further upstream, Descent into Hell (1971) reactivates a dramatic verticality, while Sibylline Universe (1970) already anticipates the density of black figures in eruption; in 1974, however, matter becomes hotter and more fluid, and the chromatic field takes over from any narration.
Justification of dating and attribution
The 1974 dating is coherent and solid: the incandescent red-orange palette, the dissolution of anatomical signs within a thermal field, the recurrence of a black-brown vertical axis, and the morphology of fractured organisms in ascent correspond to the year’s plastic markers. The 73 × 100 cm format—frequent among the major canvases of 1974–1975—reinforces this coherence.
The attribution to Breuillaud rests on the handling (layered glazes and fine transitions), on the recurring ocular vocabulary of the period, and on the very specific way entities are made to arise through torsion and jetting directly from colour. The work is reproduced, titled, and dated in the Catalogue Michelle Philippon (1992).
Provenance / exhibitions / publications
Vence (mentioned as provenance). Private collection (not specified). Signed lower left. Reproduced in the Catalogue Michelle Philippon (1992).
© Bruno Restout — Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud