Technical information
- Title: Rupestrian Presences
- Date: 1963
- Technique: Oil on paper
- Dimensions: 65 × 50 cm
- Location: Private collection *
Biographical / historical context
In the early 1960s, Breuillaud progressively leaves landscape and scene behind, turning the figure into a field of trials: no longer a described body, but a presence in formation, made of envelopes, supple volumes, thresholds and tensions.
Working on paper—more direct as a studio support—favours superimpositions, pentimenti and the alloying of line and wash.
In Rupestrian Presences, this research condenses into a vertical image that reads less as a place than as a mental wall: a luminous reserve from which forms rise like traces, vestiges or apparitions.
Formal / stylistic description
On a cream-yellow ground largely left in reserve, a bundle of organic forms rises and folds back on itself, built through passages of pinkish ochre, earthy browns and greenish blues.
The stretched and sometimes knotted silhouettes seem to touch in places and avoid each other in others, as if they belonged to the same sheet differentiating under internal pressure.
Drawing intervenes through a nervous, sometimes interrupted line that incises the material and re-launches the contours; some areas hollow into dark cavities, others dissolve into translucent rubbings where the support shows through.
Between painting and drawing, the whole brings into view a group of indeterminate presences—at the border of human, animal and mineral—held by a vertical circulation and by the balance between densities and erasures.
Comparative analysis / related works
By its format and its device of luminous reserve, this oil on paper relates to the 1963 research in which Breuillaud tests the figure as an organism, before the dramatic expansion of the great red choreographies of segment 63B.
It also dialogues with the “rupestrian” inflection works of the same year: the idea of trace on a wall and of a presence emerging from a clear field is transposed here into a more interior, less narrative register.
The piece stands out through the clarity of its paint/drawing articulation, reinforcing the sensation of a laboratory and a formation in progress.
Justification of dating and attribution
The 1963 dating is reinforced by the “63” inscription on the support and by stylistic concordance with the organic research of this year: supple contours reworked by line, alternation of colour veils and more coagulated zones, and internal cavities playing a structuring role.
The choice of paper in a 65 × 50 cm format corresponds to a studio practice conducive to tests and superimpositions.
The visible signature and the coherence of the formal vocabulary confirm attribution to André Breuillaud.
© Bruno Restout - Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud