Technical information
- Title: Abstract Figures
- Date: 1962
- Technique: Pastel
- Dimensions: 49 × 65 cm
- Location: Private collection
Biographical / historical context
In 1962, Breuillaud is at a moment when the figure is no longer conceived as a descriptive body, but as a presence: an architecture of signs and internal tensions.
The pastel medium favours an immediate writing of modulation—rubbings, erasures, reprises—making it possible to set up boundary-forms between appearance and dissolution. The title Abstract Figures explicitly states this intermediate status: “figures” through posture and relation, “abstract” through the loss of narrative attributes.
Formal / stylistic description
Subject / motif: two (or several) vertical presences are suggested, like simplified bodies, set within a large ovoid/rectangular field with rounded edges.
Support / format: horizontal format; central “framed” field, bordered by a lighter zone, like a peripheral reserve. Dominant palette: ochre yellows and beiges (ground and reserves); grey-greens / blue-greens (internal masses); blacks / blue-blacks (lines and hollows); a few orange accents.
Values / contrast: moderate yet structuring contrasts; the figure stands out less by value than by dark contour and density of matter; the light reserves stabilise the whole. Construction: composition of “cavities” and compartments; masses are divided by a network of dark lines, like partitions; two central verticalities organise a face-to-face or proximity effect.
Material / gesture: pastel applied in rubbings and superimposed layers; erased zones revealing the ground; emphatic black tracings that punctuate the surface; powdery, granular passages.
The pastel functions like a skin: form emerges through densification, then dissolves into transparencies. The “figures” are structures: torsos, shoulders or heads are not anatomically drawn, but evoked by interlocked volumes and articulation lines. Space is compressed: there is no perspective, but a cohabitation of presences within a closed field.
Comparative analysis / related works
The work continues a vocabulary where the living is translated into organisms and membranes: charcoal-like contours, internal masses compartmentalised, the figure reduced to a “schema of being”.
Its specificity lies in the dominance of the dark line network, which produces a sensation of partitioning, almost mineral. The choice of pastel enhances the ambivalence between matter (powder, rubbing) and drawing (clear tracing), placing the work at the frontier between gestural study and fully conceived composition.
Justification of dating and attribution
The 1962 date is consistent with: residual figuration (anthropomorphic presences) integrated into an abstract construction; the use of a dark line network as armature; the closed, single-field space; and the logic of “figure” treated as an internal form rather than as a scene.
The pastel medium aligns with a practice suited to rapid variations in density and erasure, fully compatible with the year’s research.
© Bruno Restout - Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud