François Arnal came to painting as an autodidact in 1947, practicing an informal and materialist abstraction, before constructing a pictorial universe of marks and imprints. In 1965, the everyday object entered his painting and brought him a step closer to the Nouveaux Réalistes: For each work in his “Bombardements” series, which he continued working on through 1971, one or several objects were placed on the canvas and the whole thing covered in spray paint (in French, peinture à la bombe aérosol); then the objects were taken away so as to preserve only the negative imprint, a white silhouette

The works of Vedovamazzei (Simeone Crispino and Stella Scala) always result from an encounter with reality, either the physical reality of an object or the virtual reality of information. This exhibition, the Italian artists’ first in Paris, gave viewers a taste of their multiform sources of inspiration. Two pieces in particular demonstrate how the realms of objects and of the media coexist in the work. The Swimmer (all works 2005) consists of eighty-nine lightbulbs of different sizes, arranged on a large white platform. All the bulbs are painted with bright images from the 1968 film The Swimmer