AB-64A-1964-002 — Theatre of Metamorphoses (c. 1964)

Technical information

Title: Theatre of Metamorphoses
Date: c. 1964
Technique: Pastel on paper
Dimensions: 50 × 65 cm
Location: Private collection

Biographical / historical context

In the mid-1960s, Breuillaud increasingly replaces legible narrative with an inner theatre of signs and transformations. The silhouettes are not characters in the traditional sense: they become hybrid presences, anatomical rebuses, actors on a mental stage where colour establishes the climate and line organises tensions.

The support fully participates in this economy: the sheet is worked recto-verso, and the presence on the other side of a finished composition signed and dated “64” provides a strong material marker, inviting the placement of this image in a close interval around 1964, within the same campaign of work.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition extends across a broad red and brown field, modulated by darker zones that close the space and give it an atmospheric density.

On this warm expanse emerge green, bluish and blackened forms, circumscribed by linear drawing that links, cuts and circulates the gaze.

Several figures—both animal and human—stand out through stretched limbs, torsions and unstable postures; isolated eyes, discs and nuclei punctuate the bodies like organs or stars, producing a constellation reading.

Pastel proceeds by superimpositions: rubbings that lay in colour, more emphatic reprises that thicken certain zones, then nervous lines that invent passages between masses.

The whole oscillates between figurative apparition and dissolution, like a game of metamorphoses in which bodies constantly recombine within the red field.

Comparative analysis / related works

Through its saturated atmosphere and bestiary of hybrid presences, the work belongs to the research in which Breuillaud makes figures emerge from a dominant chromatic milieu, then stabilises them with an active contour.

Compared with more compact compositions where forms mineralise into a block, this sheet maintains a fragmented stage dynamic: silhouettes respond at a distance without narrative settling—characteristic of a transitional step around 1964.

The prominence of black line, structuring and tensioning colour, announces a graphic vocabulary in which each form acts like an actor and each blot like a light.

Justification of dating and attribution

The dating “c. 1964” is supported by the red/brown palette opposed to cold blue-greens, the alliance of a continuous chromatic atmosphere with a very active linear drawing, and the theme of figures in metamorphosis recurrent in the mid-1960s.

The material index of the recto-verso—bearing on the other side a composition dated “64”—reinforces the probability of an execution within a close interval and confirms the sheet’s insertion within Breuillaud’s corpus.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Private collection.