AB-MP3-1965-006 — Head in the Light (1965)

Technical information

Title : Head in the Light
Date : 1965
Technique : Oil on canvas
Dimensions : 130 × 195 cm
Location : Private collection

Biographical / historical context

Head in the Light holds a singular place within Breuillaud’s production of 1965: while most MP3 works of the year favour black-and-white on paper, he returns here to large format and colour, as if the experience of the “inner plates” suddenly had to be projected onto canvas. The painting condenses a moment of reopening: the matrix-like universe developed in 1963–1964 does not disappear, but is transformed into a theatre, a polyphony of nested scenes. The work thus appears as a hinge, already oriented toward the chromatic and symbolic expansions of 1966–1967.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition unfolds against an incandescent orange ground, crossed by frames and painted sheets that nest like superimposed images. On the left, a monumental ovoid head dominates the space; its isolated, shining eye acts as a focus of gaze and light. At the centre, a dislocated female body—its fleshy volumes modelled in pinkish and ochre tones—contorts in an almost centrifugal choreography, while a multitude of larval beings and figurative fragments proliferates along the edges and at the bottom of the canvas. In the rear zone, a nocturnal violet landscape emerges, topped by a solar disk crossed by an X—a sign of tension that opposes symbolic rigor to organic fluidity. The paint, granular and vibrating, lets darker passages surface as supports: black pockets, hollowed silhouettes, greenish flares. The whole functions as a scene of mutation, where figures seem at once to be born and to dissolve in the warm light that envelops them.

Comparative analysis / related works

While reintroducing polychromy, the canvas retains structural principles specific to MP3: clusters of interlocked figures, internal circulation, and the coexistence of an outside and an inside. It can be read as a monumental counterpart to Inner Space (AB-MP3-1965-005): here, the interior externalizes itself and fractures into embedded tableaux. The presence of masks, interrupted bodies, and solar signs anticipates the more “cosmic” large compositions of 1966–1967, while the dominant head echoes—on an amplified scale—the hieratic apparitions glimpsed in Pearl Night (AB-MP3-1965-004). Through its mise en abyme device, the work reintroduces a rare narrative dimension at this moment, without leaving the organic logic of the series.

Justification of dating and attribution

The dating to 1965 is supported by stylistic coherence with MP3 works of the same year, notably the granular texture and the fleshy modelling already present on paper, here transposed to large scale. The orange, violet, and ochre range, as well as the insistence on signs (crossed disk, internal frames), indicate a phase of re-emergence that directly prepares 1966. The visible signature on the canvas, together with these formal correspondences with the corpus, confirms the attribution to Breuillaud.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Reproduced in Pillement, Visages du Monde, 1967 (colour plate XI). Private collection.