AB-62A-1962-008 — Wasteland World (1962)

Technical information

Title: Wasteland World
Date: 1962
Technique: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 81 × 65 cm
Location: Location: Unknown

Biographical / historical context

In the same period, Breuillaud develops a darker strand of research, in which the organic becomes “mineralised” and the image takes on the appearance of an inner landscape in ruins. The title Wasteland World expresses this direction: an abandoned world, crossed by fractures and scars, where the figure is no more than a trace embedded in matter.

These canvases articulate gestation and disappearance: they extend embryonic themes, but shift them toward a vision of matter as deposit, sedimentation and collapse.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition is dominated by a large, dark, quasi-monolithic mass, whose surface is worked with scratches, striations and lighter areas that emerge like islets.

Contrast is achieved through relief and whitening rather than colour: a dense black opposes luminous reserves, as if a motif were attempting to detach itself from a compact ground.

A network of lines and crack-like marks structures the space, giving the painting a powerful material presence at the boundary between figure and landscape.

Comparative analysis / related works

Within the 1962 corpus, this canvas stands out through its gravity and reduced chroma, yet it remains linked to organic works by the logic of nucleus and filaments.

It can be compared with Fossil Dream, which deploys the same dialectic between mass, trace and apparition, and with the dark experiments of 1961 whose density it extends.

By contrast, pastels and red-chalk drawings from the same ensemble maintain a more direct relationship to the body; here the motif seems to have sunk into the matter, as if fossilised—hence the idea of a “world” left fallow rather than a scene.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1962 dating is consistent with this turning point toward mineralised and strongly material images, where forms are inferred through striations and reserves cut into a dark mass.

Attribution rests on the coherence of handling (surface worked by scratches, organisation by nuclei, tension between compact and filamentary) and on thematic continuity with contemporaneous cycles.

The signature is not clearly identifiable on the reproduction provided; dating and attribution are therefore supported by comparative analysis within the corpus.