PERIODS

Preamble — The work as metamorphosis

There are painters who change style as one changes seasons. And then there are those—rarer—for whom painting is not a succession of periods, but a single passage: continuous, organic, irreversible. André Breuillaud belongs to this second family: artists who move forward slowly, quietly, yet with an inner necessity so strong that it ultimately gives birth to a world.

At the beginning, he paints the visible. The first decades tell of an apprenticeship with reality: popular scenes, figures, bouquets, landscapes—everything life offers the eye when language is still being found. Yet already the canvas is not mere description. Beneath the surface, something grows: density, gravity, a taste for matter, a way of constructing space as if every form had to carry weight. The world is not decorative; it is lived.

Then comes the light of the South. Provence is not only a place: it acts like a force. The landscape simplifies, strips back, becomes geometric. Hills turn into planes, houses into volumes, shadows into architecture. The painter gradually stops recounting what he sees: he begins to seek what organises the visible—what holds it upright, what brings it forth.

This is when the great mutation opens. From the 1950s onwards, Breuillaud does not leave the world; he passes through it, as one passes through a skin. Figuration cracks. The motif dissolves. In its place appear masses, nuclei, membranes, filaments—as if painting had decided to descend beneath the surface of things, into a depth where objects are no longer recognisable, yet forces can be sensed. The canvas becomes a place of genesis: forms are no longer placed; they emerge. They build themselves by transforming. One no longer looks at a landscape; one witnesses a birth.

In the 1960s and 1970s, this inner living matter expands until it becomes cosmos. Breuillaud invents a unique iconography: translucent entities, bodies in the making, fluid faces, nocturnal scenes, architectures of matter and light. Space dilates, colour breathes, figures cease to be human and become apparitions—not characters, but presences. It is no longer the story of an external world: it is the story of a world forming, unforming and reforming, like an immense respiration.

Finally, in the last years, tension turns into breath. Forms settle, unions return—couple, maternity, fusion. Everything seems to move toward synthesis. As if, after exploring depths, Breuillaud sought an ultimate light: not the light that illuminates, but the light that reconciles.

Thus the whole œuvre appears as a long metamorphosis: from the visible toward the invisible, from motif toward genesis, from matter toward breath.

And perhaps this is Breuillaud’s singularity: to have painted not the world as it is, but the world as it becomes.

André Breuillaud’s work organised into sequences.

Periods menu

Menu 1 — 1920–1949: Figurative origins

Menu 2 — 1950–1965: The formal mutation

Menu 3 — 1966–1980: The organic & cosmic world

1920–1944

Figurative origins: the world still visible

General logic: Breuillaud constructs a solid relationship with reality—drawing, composition, the craft of paint—while already pushing matter and space beyond mere depiction.

1920–1929 | Training and first affirmations

A figuration still “classical”, but already energetic.

The importance of drawing and compositional grounding.

Colour serves volume, without yet becoming autonomous.

1929–1936 | Montmartre / the “human period”

Popular subjects: streets, markets, caravans, modest figures.

Heightened expressivity: thicker paint, tensions of planes, faces sometimes “torn”.

Reality is less described than sensed.

1936–1944 | Constructed figuration, densification

The canvas becomes more architectural.

Space closes in and compacts: a sense of mass, gravity, sometimes nocturne.

An interest in internal structures can already be felt—preparing the post-war shift.

Visual markers: readable figuration, solid masses, more present matter, “inhabited” colours.

1945–1954

Provence: landscape as structure (PR periods)

General logic: the landscape is no longer a motif; it becomes a system. Breuillaud learns to “summarise”: planes, rhythms, balances.

PR1 (c. 1945–1949) | Reconstructed landscape

Simplification of forms.

Volumes organise into blocks; drawing becomes more synthetic.

PR2 (c. 1950–1954) | Geometrised landscape / hinge

The subject de-embodies: houses, hills, trees become modules.

Colour begins to act as a spatial force.

This is the launch ramp for the “formal mutation”.

Visual markers: coloured planes, firm construction; the motif is still legible but begins to “decompose”.

1955–1961

The “formal mutation”: from the constructed world to the generated world (MP1 → MP3, then filament threshold)

Here Breuillaud leaves the motif behind: he no longer paints “what is”, but “what is forming”.

MP1 (c. 1955–1956) | Deconstruction of landscape

Reality breaks into units.

Curvatures appear; internal tensions; “signs”.

MP2 (c. 1956–1958) | Organisation by masses + organic push

Masses become almost anatomical.

The palette intensifies; space becomes a field of pressures.

MP3 (c. 1958–1959) | Pre-organic / embryonic

A core of your present corpus: proto-organisms, vortices, pockets, nuclei.

The canvas functions like an incubation: forms in growth, fusion/dissociation.

It is the matrix of almost everything that follows.

1960–1961 | “Filament” threshold / proto-cosmic

Masses open into networks, lines, meshes.

The question becomes: how does a form hold when it is made of flows?

Visual markers: disappearance of the motif; birth of nuclei, membranes, embryonic forms, then lines/networks.

1962–1966

The living appears: translucent scenes, embryology, then the monumental turn

General logic: the organic is no longer latent; it becomes iconography.

1962–1963 | Organisms and “scenes”

More ensemble-like compositions emerge (without returning to classical figuration).

Transparencies, luminous epidermis, red/black tensions, dissolved figures.

The canvas becomes a biological theatre.

1964 | Hinge year

Stabilisation of certain motifs: “masks”, “monsters”, maternity (as iconography).

The language is solid enough to deploy in large formats and series.

1965–1966 | Consolidation and rise in power

1965: membrane threshold, inner light, “chamber” spaces.

1966: the MP4 cycle ignites: telluric densities, nocturnes, monumentality.

Visual markers: the figure is not “human”, but it is there—masks, embryos, scenes, entities.

1966–1972

MP4 then CC: the great nocturnal / telluric painting and the cosmic opening

General logic: Breuillaud now paints complete worlds—matter, crowds of entities, depth, verticality.

MP4 (1966–early 1967) | Nocturnes, density, visions

Red, black, deep blue.

Suspended bodies, “darkness”, curtains, limbo, figures under compression.

Monumentality: the canvas becomes a total space.

1967 | Major synthesis

Large-format structuring works (crucible, ascending forms).

The organic becomes cosmology.

1969–1972 | Shifts of palette and space

Entries of more open fields, sometimes yellows, sometimes more aerial.

Entities cease to be “born in matter”: they circulate toward an autonomous space.

Visual markers: large formats, verticalities, magma, crowds of entities, then more open/cosmological spaces.

1972–1980

CCL: the final cycle — spectral, erotic, circular, fusion-like

General logic: painting becomes more concentrated—less “world”, more “nucleus”. Themes of condensation, halo, union.

1972–1974 | Nuclei / spectres / blue medusae

Red foci, blue halos, spectral forms.

The living becomes an apparition (less “magma”, more “aura”).

1974–1977 | Fibres, interlacings, circles

The body returns through fusion: interweavings, torsions, circularities.

Erotic in a cosmic sense: the living as knotting.

1979–1980 | Final unions / appeasement

Works of synthesis: “eye”, couple, maternity, final breath.

Form pacifies without simplifying: it becomes emblem.

Visual markers: halos, spectres, red knots, circles, fusion, circularity, final appeasement.

Overall view in one sentence

1920–1954: from the visible (the world) toward structure (constructed landscape).

1955–1965: form begins to be born (mutation / embryology).

1966–1980: form becomes world (nocturnal/cosmic), then nucleus (halo, fusion, union).

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