AB-62A-1962-007 — The Giant Ant (c. 1962)

Technical information

Title: The Giant Ant
Date: c. 1962
Technique: Red chalk
Dimensions: 69 × 43 cm
Location: Private collection

Biographical / historical context

Around 1962, Breuillaud frequently uses red chalk to return to a sharper drawing, while maintaining an ambiguity between figure, insect and organism.

The title The Giant Ant signals this tendency toward metamorphosis: the motif reads as much as a scene of bodies in motion as an enlarged, unsettling animal apparition. In this register, the artist privileges the mobility of line and the superimposition of poses, seeking less a narrative than the sensation of an unstable presence.

Formal / stylistic description

The sheet is structured by a rubbed brown-red ground, from which light reserves detach silhouettes and volumes.

Red chalk and a darker line modulate contours: some segments assert themselves (back, limbs, axes), while others fade, creating a multiple, shifting reading.

The central motif, composed of rounded forms linked by angular connections, may evoke a body, a carapace or a head, reinforcing the ambiguity between human anatomy and an insectoid imaginary.

Comparative analysis / related works

The piece sits at the intersection of the figural sheets of 1962 (white reserves, superimposed silhouettes) and the more organic images of the same ensemble (embryos, masses in gestation).

By its linear energy it echoes pastels in which the body fragments into palimpsests, while already announcing—through the density of the ground and the tension of contours—the gravity of darker canvases (Wasteland World, Fossil Dream).

The use of red chalk strengthens the link with studio practice: an autonomous study nourished by a process of variation and transformation of recurring motifs.

Justification of dating and attribution

The “c. 1962” dating is justified by stylistic proximity to sheets dated to that year: rubbed ochre/earth ground, light reserves, superimpositions and filamentary line that builds form rather than describing it.

Attribution is reinforced by coherence of vocabulary (organic metamorphoses, figure/animal ambiguity, tension between effacement and accentuation of line) and by the work’s place within a homogeneous series.

In the absence of a clearly legible signature or dated element on the reproduction, an approximate dating is retained on the basis of internal comparison.