AB-64B-1964-003 — The Round Dance (1964)

Technical information

Title: The Round Dance
Date: 1964
Technique: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 65 × 81 cm
Location: Unknown

Biographical / historical context

In 1964, Breuillaud’s imaginary expands toward a more cosmological vision: the matrix is no longer only a site of gestation—it becomes a space of gravitation.

In segment 64B, the artist multiplies circular, closed or semi-closed fields in which organisms arrange themselves as if rotating around a centre.

The Round Dance testifies to this search for balance between dance and attraction, between a choreography of forms and an energetic organisation.

The painting proposes less a scene than a system: an inner world held by a nucleus, where presences orbit, approach and dissipate.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition is organised around a large blue-green circle that occupies most of the field, like a planet or celestial membrane set against a darker ground.

In the upper part of the circle, an orange nucleus—densely modelled—radiates and seems fissured by nervous reddish and ochre lines that extend as veins through the sphere.

Around this centre, distended anthropomorphic forms distribute themselves in a crown: denser orange silhouettes, more translucent bluish fragments, presences that cling to the edge or traverse the field on diagonals.

The paint is thick, sometimes scraped; the surface retains a granulation that makes colour vibrate.

Filaments and line reprises draw axes of force, giving the whole a sense of orbit and slow rotation—an inner dance held back by a somber gravity.

Comparative analysis / related works

The work extends the 64B networks by giving them a more clearly centred structure. Where Light Trap organises a horizontal web of connections, the present painting imposes a ring logic: the network becomes circular and the figures read as satellites.

In relation to the matrix scenes of 63B, the theatrical dimension is reduced in favour of a cosmic device, while the ambiguity of bodies remains: neither characters nor abstractions, but organisms in transition.

It thus anticipates later compositions in which space unfolds in circles and concentric fields, with a more systematic circulation of nuclei and filaments.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1964 date is supported by the blue-green palette structured around an orange nucleus, a combination typical of segment 64B, and by the appearance of an affirmed circular dynamic, rare before this year.

Reddish filaments linking the forms, the thick facture worked by scraping and wiping, and the absence of continuous white membranes characteristic of later phases situate the work coherently in 1964.

Taken together, the plastic and technical criteria confirm attribution to Breuillaud.