Technical information
- Title : Blue Jellyfish
- Date : 1972
- Technique : Oil on canvas
- Dimensions : 81 × 110 cm
- Location : Private collection
Biographical / historical context
In 1972, Breuillaud deepens the opening of his blue universe: after the red matrices of 1971, forms cease to be bodies distorted by magma and become autonomous organisms evolving in a fluid night. The logic of weight gives way to a liquid gravity, without fixed orientation, and pictorial space takes on the aspect of a kind of “cosmic water.”
Blue Jellyfish belongs to this stage in which the organism is no longer merely issued from matter, but becomes living matter itself. The source notice also mentions the wording “Pillement 1967” in associated documentation—an indication that underlines the continuity of the terminology for floating forms while showing its culmination here as an independent apparition.
Formal / stylistic description
In a blue-black field crossed by dark bands and green veins, two luminescent yellow-green forms stand out, as if gelatinous. The larger one, on the left, opens like a fan and extends in a curve, with soft points that evoke filaments or submarine flames; embedded eyes and internal nodules appear within it, giving the creature a diffuse perception.
On the right, a second, more compact entity echoes the first: the same inner glow and the same drift, but with finer appendages suspended in the blue night. Around them, ghostly silhouettes and traces of membranes suggest that the entire milieu is inhabited—not by characters, but by currents of life and lingering afterimages.
The paint lays down halos and erasures so that the organisms seem to form and dissolve in the same movement. Light does not illuminate from outside: it rises from within the forms, like contained energy gently irradiating into the abyss.
Comparative analysis / related works
Compared with Spectralis, where the blue world is organized around a vertical entity and axial tension, Blue Jellyfish privileges drift and suppleness: forms are more compact and more embodied, yet resolutely post-human. Unlike Origin, which stages a generative matrix, the organism here appears self-engendered, already endowed with internal coherence.
The work also differs from Obsession: every red remainder has disappeared, replaced by a gelatinous, luminescent logic. This family of floating organisms anticipates the developments of 1972–1973, then the fluid beings and large membranes of the following years, where life is conceived as a configuration of light and milieu.
Justification of dating and attribution
The palette dominated by nocturnal blue and luminescent greens, combined with dense yellow highlights, corresponds to a chromatic signature typical of 1972. The presence of autonomous organisms not directly derived from human anatomy places the painting within the phase in which Breuillaud invents “floating” creatures within an abyssal medium. The source notice mentions “Vence” on the reverse and a reproduction in the Catalogue Michelle Philippon (1992), elements that support the chronological anchoring. The attribution is confirmed by the coherence of the handling: inner halos, permeable contours, and the fusion of the biological and the cosmic into a single pictorial substance.
Provenance / exhibitions / publications
Catalogue Michelle Philippon (1992).
© Bruno Restout — Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud