AB-MP4-1966-006 — Identity of the Realms (1966)

Technical information

Title : Identity of the Realms
Date : 1966
Technique : Oil on canvas
Dimensions : 162 × 114 cm
Location : Unknown

Biographical / historical context

Painted in 1966, Identity of the Realms belongs to the moment of maximum scale within the MP4 cycle, when Breuillaud seeks to condense—on large formats—a cosmogony in which the human, the animal, and the vegetal cease to be separate categories. After more tightly focused research, often explored through tonal values, he reintroduces total, flamboyant colour here in the service of an overall vision. The title underlines this ambition: it is not a matter of describing distinct beings, but of affirming a continuity—an underlying “identity” that runs through the realms and makes their metamorphoses possible.

Its reproduction noted in the Pillement Catalogue (1967) confirms the importance granted to this canvas within the year’s MP4 core. The format and iconographic density belong to a sequence in which Breuillaud enlarges the scale of his compositions and replaces the isolated motif with a systemic organization made of filiations, grafts, and passages from one form to another.

Formal / stylistic description

The composition is built on a strongly orchestrated verticality, like a living column set within a dark violet frame. The central field, saturated with presences, is traversed by large red and orange bodies with supple—sometimes hypertrophied—limbs that brace, hang, or twist back on themselves, while green formations in clusters and stalks colonize the middle axis. These fleshy masses are answered by paler, whitened or ivory forms, placed like breathing relays within the density.

Space is not constructed through perspective but through layers: masks, heads, organs, and fragments of bodies interlock and overlap, each retaining its autonomy as an emblem. The paint shifts between localized impastos, velvety rubbings, and nervous strokes that ring the contours without sealing them. This instability keeps the figures in a state of becoming: silhouettes seem to derive from one another, as if the canvas were a common reservoir from which multiple identities arise, alter, and respond.

Comparative analysis / related works

By ambition and scale, Identity of the Realms is close to The Garden of Masks (MP4-1966-007), with which it shares figurative profusion and the idea of a matrix-like space. Where The Garden of Masks privileges a more theatrical, circulating dynamic, Identity of the Realms concentrates on a vertical thrust—almost arboreal—insisting more on the fusion of realms than on staging a “theatre” of metamorphosis.

Compared with Limbo (MP4-1966-002), dominated by densification and saturation, this canvas opts for a diversity of contrasts and a more articulated distribution of masses, opposing peripheral reds to green ascents and to central points of clarification. It also extends achievements from MP3 (1964–1965)—torsions, flexible silhouettes, the principle of multiple masks—while reconfiguring them within a more monumental architecture, as if the organic vocabulary were straightening and structuring itself into a totem.

Justification of dating and attribution

The dating to 1966 is supported by its reproduction in the Pillement Catalogue (1967) and by its stylistic coherence with the MP4 language of that year: intense polychromy, networks of structuring red bodies, a proliferation of mask-forms, and the articulation of a matrix-like space. The verticalized construction, the coexistence of chromatic registers, and the facture that combines rubbings with impasto place the work very close to the major contemporary compositions and support its attribution to André Breuillaud without reservation.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Reproduced in the Pillement Catalogue (1967).