AB-64A-1964-008 — Untitled (1964)

Technical information

Title: Untitled
Date: 1964
Technique: Mixed media
Dimensions: 65 × 50 cm
Location: Private collection *

Biographical / historical context

In 1964, Breuillaud enters a phase in which the human figure—far from any naturalism—again becomes a central stake: not a “subject”, but a presence tested within matter, as though the body had to be rediscovered under a layer of night.

In this moment, construction through networks and nuclei bends toward a more anthropomorphic dramaturgy: the form elongates, rises, and breaks into elementary gestures.

This work belongs to that tension zone: silhouettes, whitened by rubbing, still carry something of the organo-membranous research of previous years, while introducing a new, almost ritual gravity that announces the more frontal confrontations of mid-decade.

Formal / stylistic description

On a dark, granular field—dominated by brown-black and charcoal greys—three figures detach themselves by revelation rather than by drawing.

The bodies, stretched and without closed contours, emerge from chalky white zones obtained by lifting, wiping and scraping, giving them a spectral yet sculptural quality.

The large figure on the left, steadier, forms a vertical pillar; at centre, a smaller silhouette seems to raise its arms in an ascensional movement; to the right, a principal presence and secondary fragments merge with the wall-like ground, as if space pressed the bodies against the surface.

The matter is crossed by incisions, scratches and filaments that fragment the background and contaminate the figures’ boundaries: the body is not set against a décor—it is torn from the same material, caught in a play of appearance and erasure.

Comparative analysis / related works

Through its violent contrast between a dark field and whitened highlights, the work dialogues with the 1963–1964 research in which Breuillaud shifts the organic toward a more legible figure while refusing narration.

The principle of multiple presences, arranged frontally within a space without depth, extends certain matrix scenes of segment 63B; but here, profusion tightens into a trio and the emphasis shifts to verticality and gesture.

Unlike the cosmological blue compositions of 64B, where forms connect in floating networks, this sheet imposes a sense of wall: the silhouettes seem imprisoned in a black mass, like imprints.

This tension between sign-body and matter-body makes it a hinge piece between the open organisms of 1962–1963 and the more telluric, condensed figures that assert themselves in 64C.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1964 date is supported by an anthropomorphic vocabulary rendered through rubbing and lifting, with chalky highlights modelling volumes without descriptive anatomy, and by a dark material worked in strata, incised and scratched.

The arrangement into vertical figures, the refusal of illusionistic depth, and the way bodily limits dissolve into the ground correspond to Breuillaud’s research around 1964, when the figure returns as apparitions embedded in the pictorial wall.

The coherence of facture and atmosphere with neighbouring ensembles of the same year confirms the attribution.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Private collection.