AB-MP4-1966-008 — Fluid Faces (1966)

Technical information

Title : Fluid Faces
Date : 1966
Technique : Oil on canvas
Dimensions : 46 × 38 cm
Location : Unknown

Biographical / historical context

In 1966, Breuillaud’s activity oscillates between two regimes: on the one hand, large matrix-like compositions that unfold a saturated cosmology; on the other, more compact formats in which the artist observes—almost experimentally—how a figure comes apart and recomposes. Fluid Faces belongs to this second register. Away from the monumentality of Identity of the Realms or The Garden of Masks, the work proposes a “laboratory” of dissolution, centred on the face as an unstable marker.

This research continues the MP3 years and earlier material experiments, but it is radicalized here: the face is no longer a sign of identity; it becomes a membrane in mutation, traversed by flows. Its reproduction in the Pillement Catalogue (1967) situates the painting in the same moment as the black-and-white investigations of 1966, when Breuillaud tests the limits of figuration by pushing it toward a spectral state.

Formal / stylistic description

Within a deliberately restricted range of greys, chalky whites, and velvety blacks, several floating heads emerge from a nocturnal ground, as if from an astral substance. A large whitened face occupies the central axis: the eyes, disproportionate, seem both fixed and wavering, while the contours extend into trails and appendages, transforming the head into an organism. Around this nucleus, secondary figures—masks, profiles, embryonic organs—appear and disappear, caught in the same movement of liquefaction.

The paint is worked through rubbings, erasures, and reworkings, producing a milky, porous texture in which form seems to dissolve at the very moment it asserts itself. Diagonal axes stretch the silhouettes and create a tipping tension, as if the figures were seized in a transitory state. The title finds its full justification here: everything is fluid, softened, unstable, and figuration holds only intermittently, on the edge of abstraction.

Comparative analysis / related works

In reduced format, Fluid Faces extends research visible in the black-and-white paintings of 1966 (notably MP4-1966-003 to 005): the same nocturnal climate and the same vocabulary of isolated heads and suspended organs, here concentrated around a single focus. In comparison with the large colour canvases of the same year, the chromatic economy strengthens the impression of a mental experiment, as if painting became a field of apparitions rather than a scene.

The link with MP3 (1964–1965) is legible in the theme of liquid bodies and faces, but fragmentation is more radical here: contours no longer stabilize a figure; they put it into crisis. The work also dialogues with contemporaneous graphic activity (the “Cosmic” drawings), sharing the idea of a face-as-interior-landscape, transposed here into a softer, more ambiguous pictorial matter.

Justification of dating and attribution

The dating to 1966 is confirmed by its reproduction in the Pillement Catalogue (1967) and by its stylistic coherence with the year’s black-and-white core: reduced palette, forms ambiguous between human and organic, and successive erasures producing a milky matter. The balance between the figure’s appearance and its dissolution into the ground, as well as the presence of floating masks characteristic of MP4, supports the attribution to André Breuillaud and places the work within the experimental sequence of 1966.

Provenance / exhibitions / publications

Publication confirmed in the Pillement Catalogue (1967).