AB-62A-1962-005 — Untitled (1962)

Technical information

Title: Untitled
Date: 1962
Technique: Pastel
Dimensions: 63 × 48 cm
Location: Private collection

Biographical / historical context

In the early 1960s, Breuillaud evolves his vocabulary toward organic and filamentary forms: the figure is no longer posed as a “solid” body, but as an apparition held by line and by reserves of matter.

1962 is a hinge year, in which the artist stabilises this language while shifting toward more allusive images, between memory of the model and metamorphosis (embryos, fossils, silhouettes). This pastel belongs to that transition: it preserves the spontaneity of drawing while asserting a construction through networks, where the ground becomes an active field that absorbs and brings forms back to the surface.

Formal / stylistic description

On a rubbed, granular ochre-red ground, several silhouettes emerge through light reserves and a nervous black line. Bodies appear superimposed and off-centre: a central figure rises, while other profiles or torsos can be read at the periphery, like a montage of poses.

The powdery pastel matter reveals denser passages, erasures and reprises, giving the whole a palimpsest quality, halfway between study and autonomous image.

Comparative analysis / related works

Its treatment through reserves and continuous lines connects it to the 1962 works in which Breuillaud privileges “membrane” and mesh over mass.

Within the same ensemble it dialogues with more explicitly organic or embryonic compositions (such as Foetus) and with works where the motif mineralises (Wasteland World, Fossil Dream), as if the figure gradually moved from the living to the fossil.

Compared with the darker experiments of 1961, the warmer palette and the use of coloured powder maintain a direct relationship to gesture, while already announcing the stretching of forms and contours that will develop in subsequent years.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1962 dating aligns with this transitional stage: primacy of line, dissolution of masses, figures in transparency, and the use of rubbed pastel as an absorbing field.

The sheet displays recurring characteristics of the artist’s corpus at this period (superimpositions, filamentary lines, white reserves, ochre/earth palette), supporting attribution.

The signature is not clearly legible on the available reproduction; identification therefore rests primarily on stylistic and technical coherence with neighbouring works of the same year.