AB-64C-1964-004 — Mask in Space (1964)

Technical information

Title: Mask in Space
Date: 1964
Technique: Oil on panel
Dimensions: 41 × 33 cm
Location: Unknown

Biographical / historical context

In 1964, Breuillaud brings several image regimes into play at once: tighter, more lithic masses; blue cosmologies built from networks; and, along a third axis, a more animated return of the figure—transfigured into a telluric and mental entity. Mask in Space belongs to this family: the painting is organised around a non-identifying face, now a nucleus of apparition.

The mask motif, already present earlier in his trajectory, is here reactivated through chromatic intensification and a vertical staging that gives the panel the force of an inner theatre, where the figure is at once centre, screen and enigma.

Formal / stylistic description

The panel is saturated with an incandescent red, modulated by browns and blacks that thicken the atmosphere and make the surface feel almost scorching.

At the centre, an oval blue-green mask—its heavy eyelids closed—asserts itself as a silent presence; its frontal stillness is immediately contradicted by the agitation of the surrounding forms.

Around this core, elongated red silhouettes, dark outgrowths and yellow pockets interlock, collide and break apart. Drawing—at times incisive, at times dissolved into paint—links fragments and sets up an undulating rhythm: possible hands, torsos and heads appear and then lose themselves in colour.

The paint is worked in build-ups, scrapings and absorbent passages, so that light seems to rise from within the red, as if held beneath the pictorial skin.

Comparative analysis / related works

The work sits at the junction between the intense scenes of 63B and the network research of 64B: it retains dramatic energy and chromatic incandescence, while recentring the image on a symbolic figure—a face acting as a focus.

Unlike the circular compositions of 64B, the structure is not orbital: it is a compressed verticality in which presences aggregate around the mask, as if drawn by a psychic gravity.

Within the 1964 corpus, Mask in Space can be read as a transitional piece: the figure remains narratively active, yet is already dissolved into an organic milieu that multiplies and contaminates it, foreshadowing the more ambiguous, condensed formations of 64C.

Justification of dating and attribution

The 1964 dating is supported by the highly saturated red-orange palette set against blue-green counterpoints, a recurrent signature of segment 64C, as well as by the interlacing of fleshly silhouettes and cosmic nuclei within a thick paint body worked through reworkings and scrapings.

The absence of large continuous white membranes—developed later—places the work before the shifts of 1965.

The coherence of handling, rhythm and chromatic dramaturgy with neighbouring 1964 ensembles confirms attribution to Breuillaud.