AB-62A-1962-006 — Foetus (1962)

Technical information

Title: Foetus
Date: 1962
Technique: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 65 × 81 cm
Location: Private collection

Biographical / historical context

In 1962, Breuillaud develops a cycle of images in which organic form serves as a matrix: embryos, envelopes, masses in gestation. In these canvases, the figure is no longer described anatomically; it condenses into a nucleus and then diffracts into filaments, as if the artist were seeking a common origin for the living and the mineral.

Foetus belongs to this moment when painting becomes both tactile (matter laid on, rubbed, scraped) and mental, presenting an “organism” in the process of formation.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition is built around a rounded central red-brown mass, worked in thickness, evoking a curled body or protective cavity.

Incisions and dark lines traverse the surface like sutures or trajectories, while the yellow-ochre ground is deliberately kept open, allowing the form to breathe and heightening the halo effect.

Contrasts rely less on blunt opposition than on shifts of density: impastos, rubbed zones, transparencies and reprises that generate an inner vibration.

Comparative analysis / related works

The theme of gestation links the canvas to contemporaneous works exploring “enclosed” volumes and doubled contours, oscillating between figure and abstraction.

It also prepares the move toward darker, more mineralised images, where the same linear energy becomes a network of fractures (Wasteland World) and fossilised forms (Fossil Dream).

Compared with sheets in red chalk or pastel from the same ensemble, oil here allows a deeper materiality and a densification of the motif, while retaining the logic of line that structures and “holds” the form.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1962 dating matches the organic vocabulary stabilised at this time: central nucleus, ochre halo, tension lines, and the use of incisions in the paint layer.

Attribution is supported by coherence of facture (worked matter, filamentary contours, earthy palette) and by the work’s clear insertion within the artist’s gestation cycle.

The signature is not distinctly visible on the reproduction available; dating and attribution therefore rest on comparative analysis with neighbouring works in the same corpus.