AB-MP4-1967-002 — Ascending Forms (1967)

Technical information

Title : Ascending Forms
Date : 1967
Technique : Oil on canvas
Dimensions : 198 × 100 cm
Location : Unknown

Biographical / historical context

In 1967, Breuillaud continues the monumental expansion begun the previous year and adopts pronounced verticality as a privileged structure for his organic visions.

In this late MP4 phase, figures are no longer arranged as narration but as internal dynamics: flow, rise, pressure, and the migration of forms.

Ascending Forms belongs to this moment of transition in which the artist, while remaining faithful to membranes and metamorphoses, already tends toward more legible, almost arborescent organizations that will prefigure the networks to come.

The painting thus proposes an image of passage: not a scene, but a continuous movement in which bodies and faces seem to cross thresholds within a cosmic darkness.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition is organized around a pale vertical axis that traverses the canvas like a living column.

Within this central flux, translucent green and yellow forms overlap as elongated silhouettes—at once human and larval—whose eyes punctuate the ascent.

Isolated heads, reddened or browned, appear at intervals like stations in the upward movement, while at the periphery darker presences—deep blues, violets, blacks—remain half-erased in the gloom.

The drawing, made of undulating lines and serpentine contours, chains bodies to one another: limbs lengthen, knot, then dissolve into veils of colour.

The paint, worked through transparencies and reworkings, reveals chromatic afterimages that amplify the sensation of a slow rise, as if an acid light were gradually emerging from the night.

Comparative analysis / related works

Ascending Forms can be understood as one of the great vertical panels of 1967, alongside the matrix-like compositions of the same period.

Through its logic of column and flux, it forms a counterpoint to The Crucible of the World (AB-MP4-1967-001), where fusion occurs through density and combustion; here, transformation is expressed through elongation and upward drift.

The canvas also extends the monumental verticality pursued in 1966 (notably AB-MP4-1966-006), while introducing a more concentrated organization of the field: the nocturnal ground becomes an absorbing space that throws the beings’ ascent into relief.

This relative clarification—without breaking with MP4 proliferation—prepares the renewed attention to network structures and pre-cellular tendencies that will become explicit after 1967.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1967 dating and the attribution to Breuillaud are consistent with the full set of observable formal criteria.

The palette—acid greens and opaline yellows against a blue-violet ground—corresponds to the luminous research of that year, while the serpentine line, the fusion of silhouettes, and the presence of embedded faces belong to the late MP4 vocabulary.

The work does not yet present the segmentation into modules or cellular networks characteristic of 1968–1970, but it already shows a tendency toward organization as trunk and ramifications, placing it precisely in the pivotal year 1967.

All elements converge toward a mature work, fully compatible with the artist’s hand and serial logic.