Technical information
- Title: Untitled (Bouquet Against a Blue Background)
- Date: 1964
- Technique: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 60 × 75 cm
- Location: Private collection
Biographical / historical context
This still life belongs to a singular moment in Breuillaud’s trajectory: in the mid-1960s, while his language often tends toward organisms and internal systems, the choice of a bouquet in a vase reads as a respite.
It is not a backward-looking return, but a punctual experiment in which the artist tests the expressive power of colour and paint through a traditional motif.
The fact that only two bouquets are known for this period gives the work particular documentary value: still life is not a sustained genre for Breuillaud, but an intimate laboratory where balance is tested—between construction and spontaneity, between density of paste and chromatic intensity.
Formal / stylistic description
A teeming bouquet, compressed into a central mass, springs from a rounded vase placed low in the composition.
The overall structure reads like a supple pyramid: the cool base of the vase, a rapid rise of stems and corollas, then a lateral expansion of foliage.
The ground—a deep, almost nocturnal blue—acts like a theatre that absorbs space and projects the bouquet forward; the tabletop is not described, giving the motif a suspended quality, like an eruption of colour in the night.
The chromatic dramaturgy rests on the opposition between a cold dominant and warm sprays: yellows, oranges, reds and purples flare up like light sources, while starry whites punctuate the surface and strike the eye.
The matter alternates brief impastos in the petals with more fused passages in the background; drawing is carried by colour, contours appearing and dissolving with the rhythm of the touches.
Comparative analysis / related works
The comparison with the other bouquet of 1964 is particularly instructive: where the other canvas privileges a clearer ground and a more ample breathing space, this one chooses the inverse option, heightening contrasts and theatricality through nocturnal blue.
Both works nevertheless share the same manner: a saturated palette, a refusal of descriptive naturalism, and a priority given to chromatic vibration, while maintaining a simple armature of vase and floral mass.
Together they confirm that, for Breuillaud, still life functions as an interlude: a punctual field where tradition is reactivated, then tipped toward a painting of inner light and chromatic emotion.
Justification of dating and attribution
The 1964 dating is coherent in light of the obvious kinship with the other bouquet of the same year—in the chromatic vocabulary, the freedom of contours and the hierarchy between ground and motif.
The maturity of the paste, the simplification of volumes and the signature integrated into the pictorial matter correspond to Breuillaud’s habits at this period.
The principal argument remains stylistic: the work belongs to a moment when a free figuration is carried by intensified colour and an assumed materiality, confirming the attribution.
© Bruno Restout - Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud