Technical information
- Title : Octopus with Silken Eyes
- Date : 1966
- Technique : Oil on canvas
- Dimensions : 60 × 81 cm
- Location : Unknown
Biographical / historical context
In 1966, André Breuillaud reaches a decisive turning point after the long 1961–1965 sequence, dominated by experiments in organic “chambers,” membranous visions, and a bluish nocturne.
The phase known as MP4 opens as a shift from interior space toward a broader “world-figure”: the painting ceases to be a mere receptacle for apparitions and becomes a milieu—an overall organism through which forces, tensions, and metamorphoses circulate.
At this pivotal moment, the artist densifies the paint and asserts a biological vocabulary that merges with a mental cartography.
The southern stays mentioned for this year reactivate a relationship to light that does not abolish the dark ground but works it from within, through iridescences and chromatic foci.
Octopus with Silken Eyes belongs to this renewal: a scene at once tactile, marine, and cosmic, in which figures rise as if from the depths of a globe in transformation.
Formal / stylistic description
The composition is organized around a compact, dark, spherical mass that plays the role of nucleus or liquid planet.
Its surface—saturated with deep blues and petrol violets—is crossed by striations, veins, and nervous lines that suggest inner circulations rather than a simple background.
Around and within this sphere, semi-human, semi-marine figures unfold in articulated extensions.
Tinted with cool greens and sulphurous yellows, the silhouettes connect through filaments, as if the whole formed a physiological network.
The eyes—pale, almost nacreous punctuations—serve as luminous anchors: they do not describe a naturalistic animal but a polymorphous presence, the centre of gravity of a dark world.
The paint, dense and granular, is worked through superimpositions, friction, and withdrawals.
The rare light flares scattered through the dark mass act as internal hearths and give the picture its breath.
By combining cosmic cartography, organic network, and marine suggestion, the canvas establishes a vision of an ecosystem in formation, on the threshold between mental landscape and imaginary geography.
Comparative analysis / related works
With its dense nocturne and its central “sphere” principle, the work extends certain constructions of 1963–1964, while distinguishing itself through a new compactness and the assertion of organic connections between figures.
It also stands apart from the more dispersed dynamics of 1965: here, energy does not scatter; it concentrates and channels itself around a nucleus.
Within MP4’s internal logic, Octopus with Silken Eyes foreshadows several 1966 canvases that explore—in different ways—the dark cohesion of the background and the suspension of bodies.
The painting thus appears as a pivot, bringing into contact the memory of earlier membranes and the more baroque expansion that will culminate, in the same year, in the cycle’s large syntheses.
Justification of dating and attribution
The 1966 dating accords with the composition’s compact, unified structure, characteristic of the first MP4 segment, and with the blue-black dominance inherited from previous years, now animated by internal luminous openings.
The mineral density of the paint, the use of a sphere-as-milieu, and the presence of figures linked in network form a concordant set of stylistic markers.
The attribution to Breuillaud is further supported by the overall coherence with the formal vocabulary of the documented MP4 cycle, and by the work’s mention in the Pillement catalogue (1967), where it is reproduced.
Provenance / exhibitions / publications
Pillement catalogue, 1967, colour reproduction, plate XII.
Probably from a coherent group presented around the MP4 period (information to be verified against the available archives).
© Bruno Restout — Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud