AB-64A-1964-001 — Written Stone (1964)

Technical information

Title: Written Stone
Date: 1964
Technique: Oil on paper
Dimensions: 65 × 50 cm
Location: Unknown

Biographical / historical context

In 1964, after the great organic networks and matrix scenes of 1963, Breuillaud tightens his vocabulary: profusion condenses, the figure becomes singular, and the image takes the form of a single nucleus set within an envelope.

Intermediate formats on paper become a privileged terrain for these investigations, in which matter is worked like a skin, a crust, a relief. Written Stone clearly inaugurates this moment: the heavy, closed central presence seems to rise from a block, as if the artist translated the organic into a mineral and mnemonic logic, halfway between imprint, fossil and sign.

Formal / stylistic description

In a vertical format, a large enveloping shape occupies almost the entire field: an irregular beige-ochre and greenish shell that encloses a heated coral-red central mass, modelled through rubbings and reworkings.

The surface is streaked with pale scratches and incisions, like writing engraved into the matter; these traces, sometimes fine and sometimes more emphatic, set the eye in motion and give the paper a relief-like quality.

Two dark ovoid zones embedded in the body of the form act like “eyes” or organs of perception. They do not compose a descriptive face, but establish a presence—a centre of attention.

Around the main mass, small inclusions and lighter pockets surface like embryonic fragments caught in the crust, while the uniform yet vibrating red ground heightens the effect of an isolated block and a figure-nucleus.

Comparative analysis / related works

The work sits at the threshold between the still open organisms of the clear 1963 series and the condensation phase of 1964: it retains the logic of pockets and nuclei, but gathers them within a single centred, almost sculptural form.

Compared with 1963 compositions built on the circulation of masses within a broader space, Written Stone imposes a frontal device: envelope, inner body, surface inscriptions.

This organisation announces the works of segment 64A and, more broadly, the “membrane + presence” aesthetic Breuillaud will develop thereafter, where the figure merges with the matter that contains it.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1964 dating is confirmed by the formal concentration into a single embedded figure, by the association of ochres with coral reds worked in layers and scratches, and by the pale incisions structuring the surface like an engraving.

The coherence of the facture—dense, striated, almost lithic—with early-1964 paper research places the work at the opening of segment 64A and confirms its attribution within the Breuillaud corpus.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Georges Pillement Catalogue, colour plate VIII (1967).