Technical information
- Title : Erotic Entanglement (II)
- Date : c. 1975
- Technique : Oil on canvas
- Dimensions : 73 × 100 cm
- Location : Private collection *
Biographical / historical context
After the red incandescence of 1974, the year 1975 opens with a radical cooling: matter ceases to be volcanic and sinks into muted blues, where bodies are no longer actors but traces. In this shift, Breuillaud explores phosphorescent forms set against a compact darkness, as if light no longer came from the world but from an inner survival.
Erotic Entanglement (II) belongs to this nocturnal modulation. Sensuality is no longer driven by the energy of fire: it is slowed, numbed, engulfed in a thick dusk. The canvas records less an erotic event than a post-event state—a corporeal memory persisting in the form of halos.
Formal / stylistic description
The composition stretches horizontally into a chain of elongated, fused bodily masses whose luminous contours barely stand out against a blue-black, almost opaque ground. Torsos slump, limbs relax, heads become translucent; the entanglement exists, but without tension or dramatic torsion, as if the matter had lost the heat required for active fusion.
The ground organises no depth: it absorbs. Yet one senses ghostly presences in the distance—barely embodied disturbances—that reinforce the idea of a mental space rather than a place. The cold light is born from the bodies themselves: bloodless pink touches, sickly greens, pale bluish halos, like a bioluminescence on the verge of extinction.
The absence of a centre is deliberate: no focal point dominates. The image reads as a continuous, level state in which desire becomes surface, and matter—heavy and slow—hangs at the edge of disappearance.
Comparative analysis / related works
A comparison with Erotic Entanglement (I) (1974) reveals a reversal: the same bodily theme, but a passage from fire to luminous ash, from forward drive to collapse. With Noctis membrana, the work shares the plunge into an autonomous night blue, yet Erotic Entanglement (II) remains more figural and more explicitly corporeal.
Older echoes may be related to the blues of 1970–1971 (research into inner phosphorescence), but here the gesture is exhausted: the light does not announce a birth, it marks a survival. Within the dynamics of 1975, the canvas inaugurates the series of exhausted bodies and prefigures the developments of 1976–1977, in which narrative yields to organisms set in the penumbra.
Justification of dating and attribution
The dating c. 1975 is formally very coherent: a petroleum and blue-black palette typical of the year, a shift from the incandescent red of 1974 towards an absorbing darkness, and the choice of a horizontal composition in which fusion becomes imprint rather than action. The vocabulary of inner halos, the way forms emerge through light highlights on a compact ground, and the sensitivity to bioluminescence place the work at the 1975–1976 transition.
Attribution is confirmed by the serial logic (cooled entanglements), by the handling in dark glazes with luminous accents, and by the morphological coherence with nocturnal pieces in the corpus. The “circa” remains plausible, but the whole makes 1975 highly probable.
Provenance / exhibitions / publications
Vence (noted as the studio location).
Private collection.
Signature consistent (according to the record).
Date indicated as “circa” in the source notice.
© Bruno Restout — Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud