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How did Paul Gauguin use flat forms and dark outlines in Vision of the Sermon?

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Self-portrait painting by Paul Gauguin showing the artist with a mustache, yellow halo, and stylized plants against a vivid orange background with green and red fruit. — Paul Gauguin Self-portrait by Paul Gauguin, oil on wood, 1889; in the Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 79.2 × 51.3 cm.

In Vision of the Sermon (1888), Paul Gauguin utilized flat forms and dark outlines as central components of his decorative style, which he termed Synthetism.12

To move away from the naturalism of Impressionism, Gauguin rejected traditional modeling, shading, and perspectival space. Instead, he employed the following techniques:123

Flat Forms: He reduced figures and landscapes to broad, intense areas of pure color without shadows or depth, creating an almost two-dimensional arrangement.123
Dark Outlines: He surrounded these simplified forms with strong, dark cloisonnist outlines, a technique inspired by the cloisonné enamel process.12

By abandoning the replication of an actual scene in favor of these pictorial means, Gauguin sought to synthesize formal elements with the emotional or spiritual idea of the subject—in this case, the vision of Jacob wrestling with the angel as imagined by the praying Breton women. This approach allowed him to fuse two levels of reality—the everyday world and the dream world—into a single, powerful visual experience.123