Paris, the 1960s. Where are images taking us?

There are moments when images stop explaining the world and begin to question it. Paris in the 1960s was one of these moments.

In Paris, during the 1960s –and even more intensely after May ’68–, the French artistic scene underwent a profound transformation. Artists explored new techniques, materials, and formats, questioning the very nature and function of the image. From the second half of the twentieth century onwards, society, the economy, science, technology, and the media transformed the living habits of the Western world. In this context, new avant-garde forms emerged.

Artists associated with Narrative Figuration championed the political dimension of the image. Their works were conceived as tools with which to denounce the contradictions of postwar capitalist society and, especially, the hegemony of the United States. Art thus became a space of ideological confrontation, marked by the rejection of consumerism, the Cold War, the nuclear threat, and the wars in Algeria and Vietnam.

Other artists, however, distrusted the image as a vehicle for narrative or ideology. In contrast, they explored a painting reduced to elemental, geometric forms derived from a minimal and repetitive gesture, in which the artist’s hand tends to disappear. The work presents itself as a literal fact, without time or narration. Images “did not have to explain”, but rather “had to be”.

The directions of this research were multiple. The image, understood as a social product, was subjected to processes of dissection and dismantling to analyse its materiality. In this sense, artists linked to the Supports/Surfaces movement investigated the pictorial support itself, deconstructing it and rethinking what a painting is. At the same time, intermediary practices developed, often ironic or distanced, combining various positions and incorporating devices such as the fragment, repetition, quotation, and displacement, in the line of the Duchampian gesture of the ready-made.

This exhibition does not oppose styles, but presents a field of forces. A moment in which painting –figurative or not– was radically called into question, in a process that remains open even today.