Jean-Michel Alberola first gained public recognition in the early ’80s, and he quickly distinguished himself as one of the most outstanding French artists of his generation. However, even though he showed unusual talent right from the start, especially in pastels, a medium rarely used by his contemporaries, he might still have been regarded as just one more young artist of whom, as we can recall, there was no shortage at the beginning of the decade. Alberola stood out because he deliberately called into question the traditional relation of an artist to his work, chiefly through the suppression