AB-63B-1963-006 — The Roots of the Night (1963)

Technical information

Title: The Roots of the Night
Date: 1963
Technique: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 130 × 168 cm
Location: Private collection

Biographical / historical context

In 1963, Breuillaud brings his organic mythology to a rare level of intensity: the living is no longer merely described in fragments, but staged as an inner cosmology. In segment 63B, he favours large chromatic matrices in which figures—at once anthropomorphic and embryonic—seem to arise from a single substance, caught in a cycle of gestation and appearance.

The Roots of the Night belongs to this nocturnal vein. The central form acts like a primal chamber, while the darker zones that cut into it and encircle it create a subterranean depth, as if the image revealed the underside of a world—its origins and conduits.

Formal / stylistic description

The horizontal composition is dominated by a vast, rounded red mass, vibrant and incandescent, occupying the centre of the field like a glowing membrane.

Around it, a deep blue-black space counterbalances the mass and turns the red oval into an organic island floating in a dense night.

Within and along the edges of this matrix, pale figures—bluish, greenish or ivory—cling, tilt or stretch; their filamentary limbs, sometimes reduced to mere segments, create the sensation of a slowed choreography.

Small circular nuclei and dark punctuations register like organs or gazes, while a nervous yellow-green network of lines traverses and links the forms like veins, nerves or roots.

Worked in layers, the paint reveals rubbings, reworkings and transparencies, reinforcing the impression of an inner theatre where colour acts as heat and contour as suture.

Comparative analysis / related works

Through its monumentality and its device of a central matrix, the work extends the research of segment 63B, in which space becomes a stage and the living multiplies into hybrid presences.

Compared with The Primal Scene (AB-63B-1963-004), it shifts the tension toward a more circular, enveloping movement, as if the narrative dissolved into a cosmic dynamic.

Set against The Eye of the Centre (AB-63B-1963-005), the canvas accentuates proliferation: the red oval is no longer only a centre, but a milieu from which bodies are born and through which they circulate, arranged along the periphery and connected by filaments.

This handling—based on a red/black contrast and suspended figures—forms a major milestone within the series of large 1963 “matrix” paintings.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1963 dating is supported by the saturated red palette set against deep blue-blacks, typical of segment 63B, and by the profusion of anthropo-organic figures treated through veils, reworkings and nervous contours.

The thick, still very present yellow-green internal network, the construction around a large central matrix and the monumental format correspond to the artist’s campaigns of work that year.

The stylistic coherence with other recorded works from the same ensemble confirms the attribution and places the painting at the heart of the 63B cycle.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Georges Pillement Catalogue, colour plate VI (1967).