AB-MP4-1970-001 — Magma Extraction (1970)

Technical information

Title : Magma Extraction
Date : 1970
Technique : Oil on canvas
Dimensions : 100 × 73 cm
Location : Private collection *

Biographical / historical context

Dated 1970, this canvas marks a turning point in which André Breuillaud pushes the MP4 register to its highest intensity. After the explorations of 1969, the surface closes in upon an incandescent, organic vision, where the background space ceases to be a mere support and becomes an active, almost atmospheric matter.

Its selection as the cover image for the catalogue of the Galerie Chave exhibition in Vence (1972) confirms the central place of this kind of composition within the great red paintings at the 1969–1970 hinge, poised between the appearance of totem-like figures and the densification of the pictorial field.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition unfolds across a highly saturated red–orange field, worked in veils that shift from dark magma to lighter, more orange passages, as if the canvas were breathing in zones.

Against this warm depth, humanoid forms—both hieratic and unstable—stand out: elongated bodies, schematic profiles, oval heads punctuated by isolated eyes, sometimes reduced to a mere glimmer. A bluish green or acidic turquoise line outlines these entities without fully enclosing them; it connects them to the ground, makes them rise, bend, and contort, as if the figure were caught in an internal current.

The whole retains a vertical legibility—upright silhouettes, raised gestures, apparitions along the edges—yet the space remains deliberately ambiguous: no ground, no horizon, only a chamber of colour in which presences seem to emerge and then dissolve.

Comparative analysis / related works

With its incandescent red and vertical totem figures, the work stands in the immediate vicinity of other MP4 canvases from 1970, notably AB-MP4-1970-002, with which it shares the idea of a red field governing the scene and the coexistence of human presences and floating signs.

It also extends an intuition already perceptible in 1969: a painting in which colour acts as a matrix, while announcing the more closed densifications that will intensify at the beginning of the 1970s. From a distance, it recalls the energy of earlier works such as Danse de feu (1962), here transposed into an organic, spectral language.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1970 dating is supported by the chromatic signature specific to the 1969–1970 turn—dominant red–orange, acidic green accents, and nocturnal blues—as well as by the manner in which the figures emerge through a nervous drawing that merges with the coloured matter.

The balance between still-discernible silhouettes and dissolution into the ground corresponds to a moment when Breuillaud stabilises his forms without renouncing their porosity. Finally, the work’s reproduction on the cover of the Chave catalogue (1972) further confirms the attribution and the canvas’s place within the documented corpus of this period.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Cover of the catalogue for the exhibition André Breuillaud, Galerie Chave, Vence, 1972.