Technical information
- Title: Fossil Dream
- Date: 1962
- Technique: Oil on canvas
- Dimensions: 100 × 81 cm
- Location: Location: Unknown
Biographical / historical context
Fossil Dream belongs to the same 1962 ensemble in which Breuillaud brings together the imaginary of the living and that of the mineral. After the images of gestation, the artist shifts the motif toward a form of sedimentation: the body becomes trace, imprint, deposit, as if it already belonged to a geological memory.
This tension between apparition and disappearance—between dream and fossilisation—corresponds to one of the major directions of the early 1960s, when painting becomes a place of metamorphoses rather than a space of descriptive representation.
Formal / stylistic description
The canvas presents a large dark mass, worked in variations of greys and blacks, within which lighter zones emerge to outline a central form.
Contours remain unstable: they are built through rubbings, reworkings and scratches, as if the figure were being unearthed by excavation.
Fracture lines and striations give the surface a rock-wall character, while the inner brightenings suggest a volume trapped within matter—at once body and vestige.
Comparative analysis / related works
Through its chromatic restraint and its surface work, Fossil Dream closely dialogues with Wasteland World: the same relationship between compact mass, luminous reserves and a network of striations.
It also counters the more directly organic works of 1962, where the motif is still “alive” and mobile; here linear energy becomes scar, and the form seems immobilised.
More broadly, the canvas extends the dark research of 1961 while announcing a cycle in which the figure merges with a matter-landscape, characteristic of the following period.
Justification of dating and attribution
The 1962 dating is supported by a “62” date visible on the reproduction and by stylistic coherence with works from the same ensemble (dark masses, striations, internal reserves).
Attribution is reinforced by a signature visible on the reproduction, as well as by continuity of facture and plastic vocabulary.
Taken together (signature, date, insertion within the 1962 “mineral” cycle), these indices support a secure dating and firm attribution.
© Bruno Restout - Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud