AB-64C-1964-005 — The Monster (I) (c. 1964)

Technical information

Title: The Monster (I)
Date: c. 1964
Technique: Oil on panel
Dimensions: 32 × 25 cm
Location: Private collection

Biographical / historical context

In 1964, while certain works open into networks or crystallise into incandescent masses, Breuillaud also explores a more interior path in which the figure condenses into a single, heavy and enigmatic presence.

The title The Monster (I) indicates less a story than a state: a form that resists identification, poised between organism, relic and possible face.

At this moment, the artist seems to shift the question of the living toward that of survival: an isolated apparition, as if rising from a nocturnal ground, whose energy lies in glimmers and surface scars rather than in the proliferation of forms.

Formal / stylistic description

The panel is dominated by a large ovoid form, placed centrally like a body suspended in dark space.

The range is unexpectedly restrained: pale beiges and ochres, muted greens, milky halos, with a few deeper blue-black touches that catch the eye.

The oval’s surface is traversed by white striations and fine lines—sometimes continuous, sometimes broken—suggesting fissures, membranes or an inner cartography. Here and there, volumes seem to lift under the skin: cavities, buds, reliefs that can be read as hints of an indistinct face, without ever stabilising.

The paint is patinated and scraped, as if formed through successive accumulations and withdrawals; the whole produces a sense of dense silence, where light grazes the surface and then folds back into the surrounding dark.

Comparative analysis / related works

Compared with Mask in Space (AB-64C-1964-004), more theatrical and populated, The Monster (I) radicalises condensation: narration closes, presence becomes monolithic.

The work nevertheless retains inheritances from 1962–1963, notably in the use of a fine linear network and the logic of internal cavities, but here these devices are applied to a single form—as if the fragmented organism were gathering itself into one block.

Within segment 64C, this turn toward an isolated entity anticipates developments in which the figure becomes mass—head-knot or weight-organism—structured by scars and glimmers rather than by scenes.

Justification of dating and attribution

The dating c. 1964 is supported by the softened ochre-green palette and by the fine linear network inherited from the techniques of 1962–1963, now applied to a single figure—precisely matching mid-1964 research within segment 64C.

The absence of a marked circular cosmological architecture characteristic of 64B, and the absence of dominant red blazing more typical of certain 63B works, support attribution to a more interior phase of 1964.

The coherence of surface treatment—patinas, scratches and restrained reprises—confirms attribution to Breuillaud.