AB-63B-1963-004 — The Primal Scene (1963)

Technical information

Title: The Primal Scene
Date: 1963
Technique: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 65 × 81 cm
Location: Private collection

Biographical / historical context

In 1963, Breuillaud crosses a decisive threshold: after research in which form fossilises and compacts, he enters a more pulsatile regime of image, where red becomes milieu, matrix and drama.

Segment 63B develops a true organic choreography: membranous entities, contacts, tears and stretchings—like a rite of origins in which everything forms within the same substance.

The Primal Scene condenses this shift into a tense composition, where internal energy prevails over any stability and where painting acts as a space of generation.

Formal / stylistic description

The painting opposes a dark field, saturated with violet blacks and deep blues, to red and orange masses that cut through it with violence.

Neither anatomical nor abstract in a strict sense, these forms behave like amoeboid bodies: they entwine, repel, open into cavities and connect through narrow passages.

The dense, striated matter bears the trace of successive reworkings; thicker areas catch the light, while dark transparencies let an internal network of lines and scratches surface.

The whole produces a sensation of visceral theatre, where form appears in constant mutation within a nocturnal medium.

Comparative analysis / related works

Compared with segment 63A compositions—where masses can still evoke mineralised structures or hardened organisms—The Primal Scene installs a more direct dynamic, founded on contact and pulsation.

It announces the great canvases of 63B where the red matrix becomes dominant, yet retains remarkable concentration: here the scene knots around a few principal entities, like a dramatic nucleus.

The work also dialogues with the “system” canvases of the same segment, which will transform this dramaturgy into a more extended network; it represents their original, conflictual face.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1963 dating rests on the dark-red palette and the stratified handling characteristic of the beginning of segment 63B, as well as on the installation of an internal choreography absent from 1962 research.

The visible signature and the coherence of the formal language (membranous masses, cavities, tension network) confirm the attribution to André Breuillaud.

The work’s presence in the Georges Pillement catalogue (1967) provides an additional documentary marker, explicitly inscribing it within a recognised corpus of the year 1963.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Georges Pillement catalogue, 1967, colour plate IV.