AB-CCL-1979-002 — The Couple’s Eye (1979)

Technical information

Title : The Couple’s Eye
Date : 1979
Technique : Oil on paper (HSPap)
Dimensions : 65 × 50 cm
Location : Unknown

Biographical / historical context

In 1979, within the late phase of the CCL cycle, Breuillaud pushes the idea of bodily and psychic fusion to its most condensed forms. After the expansive, incandescent compositions of the late 1970s, certain works on paper shed spectacle to reach a radical austerity.

The Couple’s Eye belongs to this tension: space grows sparse, colour withdraws, and the scene is reduced to a closed unity in which two beings cease to be distinct. The motif of the gaze, omnipresent throughout the corpus, is concentrated here into a single eye, as if the couple’s consciousness crystallized into one centre.

The work thus appears as an intimate meditation on unity: flesh becomes membrane, membrane becomes a mental envelope, and fusion is no longer a narrative event but a condition of existence.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition forms an ovoid, almost cellular mass whose contour envelops two bodies folded into one another. Anatomies are readable only in fragments—shoulder, breast, knee, leg—yet the overall torsion prevents any hierarchical reading: the couple is a single form, knotted and self-sufficient.

The focal point sits at the top, in an isolated eye that belongs to no fully constituted face. Set like an organ of watchfulness, it surmounts the fleshly envelope and lends the whole an inner, almost mental dimension: vision is no longer individual; it becomes the gaze of unity.

The medium on paper allows very subtle modulations of value. Shadows insinuate themselves without rupture, contours dissolve into light halos, and a pearly grey range keeps the work in a register of silence. In this climate, the hands—elongated, nervous, superimposed—take on decisive expressive weight: they envelop, hold, and organize fusion through gesture.

Comparative analysis / related works

The work directly extends Breuillaud’s investigations of the entwined couple, already visible in the compositions of 1976, where fusion is still dense and almost sculptural. In 1979, that density turns inward: the form closes, the outside world fades, and union becomes a cocoon.

In contrast to the large collective rounds of 1977, rotation and circulation are here reduced to the dyad. Movement is no longer expansive; it is folding and turning back, like a single breath.

Finally, the theme of the gaze links The Couple’s Eye to works of the same period that intensify questions of vision and doubling. Where certain paintings unfold a field of eyes and tensions in an incandescent space, this drawing offers their minimal, almost meditative condensation.

Justification of dating and attribution

The late morphology—closed torsion, rounded shoulders, filament-like hands, disappearance of setting—corresponds to the works on paper of the late 1970s and to the shift toward an interior austerity.

The neutral range, softened modelling, and absence of chromatic saturation reinforce its placement within 1978–1980, when Breuillaud favours desaturated atmospheres and dissolved contours.

The presence of the signature and the dated annotation visible on the work, together with its stylistic coherence with the late CCL corpus, supports a date of 1979 and the attribution to André Breuillaud.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Michelle Philippon collection (1992 catalogue).

Classified among works on paper from the end of the Vence period.

Signed lower left; date annotation “79” lower right.