AB-CCL-1975-002 — Hallucinations (1975)

Technical information

Title : Hallucinations
Date : 1975
Technique : Oil on canvas
Dimensions : 60 × 81 cm
Location : Unknown

Biographical / historical context

In 1975, Breuillaud explores two paths at once: nocturnal immersion (muted blues, gelled forms, extinguished fusion) and an inverse, brighter route in which matter appears bleached, almost emptied. Hallucinations belongs to this second axis: a pale luminous zone where forms float without weight, halfway between apparition and erasure.

This oscillation is characteristic of the mid-decade: the artist tests thresholds, as if painting the instant when a mental image forms and then dissolves. The canvas comes from a brief, rare phase (1975–early 1976) dominated by “pale lemon” fields and entities reduced to sensitive fragments.

Formal / stylistic description

The ground is a milky yellow field, uniform, with no horizon and no identifiable light source. It evokes not an exterior but a mental space—a drift chamber where everything seems suspended. Within this clarity, figures do not coalesce into characters: they are organ-fragments, breaths, cavities, membrane-forms, appearing like visualised thoughts.

An isolated eye floats, detached from any anatomy, while other elements—metamorphic mouths, foetal forms, translucent folds—suggest a corporeality in formation, not yet embodied. The line is fine, slightly tremulous, almost incised: presence depends less on material thickness than on the precision of the trace, close to drawing transposed into paint.

The palette is deliberately restricted: very pale yellow, light greens, underlying pinks, and greyed zones around the cavities. This yellow is not solar; it acts as a mental yellow, a dream yellow, placing the work in rupture with the nervous reds of 1974 and the nocturnal blues of 1975.

Comparative analysis / related works

Hallucinations may be compared with Erotic Entanglement II (1975) for its overall movement of extinction, but it is the bright version: instead of engulfing forms in blue, it lets them drift in a washed-out light.

The finesse of the line also recalls certain pastels and drawings from 1972–1973, though with a more advanced abstraction and a more “mental” space.

Toward 1976, the work anticipates the shift toward translucent organisms and more airy membranes: here, hierarchy already disappears, the scene has no centre, and the image reads as a pictorial stream of consciousness rather than a narrative composition.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1975 dating is fully coherent: the use of a pale yellow specific to that year within the corpus, advanced fragmentation without yet tipping into later gelation, and the primacy of fine line over impasto. The atmosphere of derealisation—neither cosmic in the sense of the great membranes, nor strictly corporeal—corresponds to this intermediate zone in the mid-1970s.

Attribution rests on the vocabulary of autonomous organs (eye, cavities, mouths), the way entities are made to float in a unified field, and the handling in very thin glazes with passages worked dry. The work is reproduced, titled, and dated in the Michelle Philippon catalogue (1992); “circa” remains admissible, but 1975 is aesthetically solid.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Vence, private collection (mentioned in the source notice).

Signature consistent (according to the record).

Reproduced in the Michelle Philippon catalogue (1992).