AB-63A-1963-003 — Untitled (c. 1963)

Technical information

Title: Untitled
Date: c. 1963
Technique: Mixed media
Dimensions: 65 × 50 cm
Location: Unknown

Biographical / historical context

During 1963, Breuillaud explores increasingly compact and dark forms, where the organic crystallises into internal architectures. In this zone of the cycle, the image willingly oscillates between organism and apparition: mineral matter, striated and rubbed, lets indices of a figure surface without ever tipping into description.

This sheet belongs to that tension. The main motif, built as a single mass, seems to carry within it a morphology of face or mask, a sign of an evolution in which organic cosmogony becomes charged with a more anthropomorphic presence.

Formal / stylistic description

Against a velvety, granular black ground stands a large light form on the right, whose volumes suggest a brow, a nasal ridge and an eye cavity. The contours, traced in black and then reworked through rubbings, enclose the figure within an irregular shell, while whitened reserves appear like flashes or exposed zones.

The centre of the motif is animated by compartments and pockets with dark edges, like open cells within matter. To the left, smaller secondary forms act as counterpoints and amplify the sense of a field of apparitions, where fragments of bodies or profiles seem to emerge and then dissolve.

The surface is worked with fine scratches and material reprises, keeping the image in a state of instability, between relief and erasure.

Comparative analysis / related works

The composition is close to the cavity-organisms of the 63A cycle, such as At the Origins of the Kingdoms (AB-63A-1963-002), through its use of light reserves embedded in a dark matrix and its construction by internal chambers.

Here, however, the organisation of volumes tends toward a facial reading, as if the organic network were tightening into a mask.

Compared with The Petrified Forest (AB-63A-1963-001), more readily read as a mineral section, this sheet introduces a dimension of presence: the image seems to look, or at least to impose a frontal sensation. This inflection announces the variations in which Breuillaud plays on the ambiguity between figure and structure, while maintaining the same economy of means and the same density of matter.

Justification of dating and attribution

The dating around 1963 is coherent with the reduced palette of blacks, greys and whites, the assertion of dark outlining, and the technique of rubbings and granulations that hollow the image out like stone.

The composition privileges a single central mass and a marked internal network, characteristic of research at this moment.

Attribution to Breuillaud is supported by the typical way form is constructed from reserves and cavities, as well as by the maintained ambiguity between organism and figure—a constant principle in his works of transition and organic densification at the beginning of the 1960s.