Technical information
- Title : Emergences
- Date : 1970
- Technique : Ink and pastel on paper
- Dimensions : 25 × 33 cm
- Location : Private collection *
Biographical / historical context
Dated 1970, this sheet belongs to the graphic side of the MP4 period, which Breuillaud develops in parallel with his large oils. In these inks and pastels, he tests lighter, quicker configurations, where form appears through transparencies, erasures, and reworkings.
The small format functions as a laboratory: it allows motifs—faces, silhouettes, filaments—to be condensed, which elsewhere expand on canvas, while retaining here a quality of apparition, almost like a nocturnal vision.
Formal / stylistic description
Against a diffuse, granular brown–purple ground, pale figures stand out like spectres: white masses modelled by rubbing, silhouettes with fluid limbs, oval heads in which eyes are reduced to dark points.
The drawing—sometimes merely brushed, sometimes incisive—traces turquoise-green contours and filament-like lines that link the presences together, like a floating nervous network. On the right, a more luminous, elongated form seems to pivot in space, while other faces appear at the margins, half swallowed by the ground.
The whole privileges superimposition and passage: no stable scene, but a succession of emergences, as if the image were holding for an instant a moment of metamorphosis.
Comparative analysis / related works
The sheet maintains a direct connection with the great reds and organic compositions of 1970 through its vocabulary of scattered faces, bodies in the process of dissolution, and the use of cold counterpoints (turquoise, green) against a dark depth.
In comparison with the oils, the matter here becomes more atmospheric: the motif inscribes itself within a field of stains and dust, bringing this study closer to the graphic works of the same period, where Breuillaud explores the boundary between figure and apparition.
Justification of dating and attribution
The dating is corroborated by the “70” inscription and the signature visible on the sheet, as well as by plastic characteristics consistent with the year 1970: dark, vibrating grounds; white figures obtained by rubbing; a turquoise-green linear network; and the multiplication of secondary faces.
The combination of transparencies, erasures, and reworkings—typical of the MP4 ink/pastel works—confirms the attribution to André Breuillaud.
© Bruno Restout — Catalogue raisonné André Breuillaud