AB-MP4-1966-003 — Composition for the Darkness (1966)

Technical information

Title : Composition for the Darkness
Date : 1966
Technique : Oil on canvas
Dimensions : 38 × 46 cm
Location : Unknown

Biographical / historical context

In 1966, Breuillaud reaches one of the densest moments of his research: the MP4 phase, where matter becomes a chamber of mutation and the figure appears at the edge of its own dissolution.

Alongside large, colour-saturated canvases, he develops a more discreet set of dark, chiaroscuro compositions that function as backstage spaces of transformation.

Composition for the Darkness belongs to this nocturnal vein. The small format encourages a studio practice attentive to emergences, returns, and erasures—as if Breuillaud were testing the body’s capacity to exist in a world where colour withdraws. The “darkness” of the title is not a simple black: it designates an intermediate state, a territory of incubation where forms prepare themselves before entering full light.

Formal / stylistic description

The work unfolds in an anthracite monochrome, animated by milky whites and thick greys that seem rubbed in, scraped back, laid down, then reworked. This striated matter creates a horizonless space—a chamber saturated with density—where depth arises from the contrast between opacity and transparency.

At the centre, a large elongated figure imposes itself: twisted, with asymmetrical limbs and swollen volumes, like a body in the process of recomposition. The whitened, almost powdery zones give this presence a spectral character; flesh seems traversed by an inner light rather than lit from without.

Around it, other smaller silhouettes—sometimes reduced to heads or fragments—float and drift, reinforcing the impression of a theatre of shadows where actors dissolve and reassemble continuously.

Comparative analysis / related works

Through its economy of means and monochrome, the canvas extends certain aspects of the MP3 phase (1962–1965), notably the idea of fragmented bodies and interior spaces.

Here, however, the gesture is heavier and the matter more mineral: the membrane densifies; transparency becomes tension.

Against the colour canvases of 1966, Composition for the Darkness explores the negative—the nocturnal root of the mutation. It maintains a particular proximity to other small-format chiaroscuro works that share its principle of suspended apparitions, while remaining more condensed and inward.

Justification of dating and attribution

The dating to 1966 is confirmed by the inscription “66” visible on the work, and by the facture’s coherence with early MP4 vocabulary: deformed yet robust anatomies, formal density, and the use of monochrome as a laboratory for emergence.

The attribution to Breuillaud is reinforced by the work’s presence in the Pillement catalogue (1967), which attests to its place within the corpus and establishes its circulation.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Reproduced in the Pillement catalogue, 1967 (plate XIII).