Technical information
- Title : Constellation of Biomorphic Forms
- Date : 1969
- Technique : Oil on canvas
- Dimensions : Unknown
- Location : Unknown
Biographical / historical context
Dated 1969, this painting belongs to a moment when Breuillaud pushes further the dematerialization of the scene. The pictorial field tends to become an atmospheric medium: the figure does not disappear, but dissolves into signs and filamentary organisms, as if suspended in a diffuse light.
Within the late-1960s corpus, the artist alternates deep, saturated nocturnal compositions with lighter canvases in which yellow, ochre, and pale greens open the space. This oscillation feeds a research into how beings can emerge not through narration, but through the circulation of lines, halos, and small concentrations of matter.
Formal / stylistic description
On a largely ochre ground—like a veil of light—Breuillaud lays out a “constellation of biomorphic forms.” Space is not built through perspective; it is established through superposed layers, transparencies, and erasures that reveal, like a watermark, traces of earlier passages.
At the center, a large greenish structure made of supple curves and ramifications organizes the composition. This form, at once body and network, extends upward into a dark arc—almost a rib—linking several schematic heads or masks. The faces, reduced to orbits and a few strokes, seem to float rather than settle, like apparitions in a liquid milieu.
The painting interweaves line and stain: red highlights and fine incisions traverse the surface, while certain areas condense into more colorful clusters. In the lower right corner, a denser nucleus—blue, red, green—acts as an energy source, contrasting with the very diluted passages elsewhere. Small drips and trembling contours intensify the idea of continuous metamorphosis.
Comparative analysis / related works
The yellow dominance and the breadth of washed zones relate the work to the “great yellows” of 1969 (notably AB-MP4-1969-002 and AB-MP4-1969-003), where space becomes atmosphere rather than décor. Filamentary silhouettes and heads reduced to signs also recall research from 1967–1968, but here the scene lightens: forms disperse and lose their block-like character.
In contrast with nocturnal compositions from the same period, light is no longer an effect of illumination; it is the very substance of the ground, against which beings barely stand out. This way of installing apparition through transparency prepares the darker, denser reconfigurations that assert themselves at the threshold of 1970.
Justification of dating and attribution
The “69” date noted at the lower right and the signature at the lower left provide direct markers for the dating. Formally, the combination of a very diluted ochre field, filamentary green tracery, and small color concentrations corresponds to the language Breuillaud develops in 1969, when he alternates large luminous canvases with deeper scenes.
The attribution is confirmed by the typology of mask-like faces, the line’s writing—both nervous and floating—and the way forms arise from within the ground itself, without closed contour or explicit narration, recurring characteristics of his late vocabulary.