Developed in 1949 and patented by Edward Seymour in 1951, the aerosol can became a preferred medium for artists around 1963. Two of them in particular, Martin Barré and Gérard Zlotykamien, seized this new tool. Their two very different practices carved out a path that is still operating today. This exhibition is built around these two approaches.

On the one hand, Martin Barré, as a forerunner, uses the aerosol can as “a tool as common as insecticide, which is at once the brush, the paint and the container that contains it”, as he confided to Catherine Lawless in Les Cahiers du musée national d'Art moderne. And so the spray burst into the hushed world of the Beaux-Arts. Immediately, many artists integrated this new tool into their painting practice. These included Kimber Smith, Jean Degottex and Hans Hartung, for whom the use of spray paint helped create open, metaphysical spaces. And to close this chapter, which could have been called “De la bombe aérosol considérée comme l'un des Beaux-Arts”, Thibault Hazelzet unveils under the glass roof two large-scale frescoes from his Méduse series (2017), deploying in space the spontaneity and lightness afforded by the spray technique.

In 1963, Gérard Zlotykamien turned the spray can into a medium in its own right, with a totally different conception and approach, contemporary with that of Martin Barré. His practice followed in the wake of graffiti (after Dubuffet and Brassaï), and would later give rise to urban art. But Zlotykamien's gestures are not only born of a scriptural impulse, they also express a trauma. That of the camps. The figures that the artist calls “ephemera”, which appear on the walls under the action of the spray, are not unrelated to the bombings of Testumi Kudo (Fossil in Hiroshima, 1976), traumatized by the nuclear blast that swept Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or those of the Englishman Roy Adzak (who, like Kudo, was fascinated by fossils). As for the polystyrenes created by Anita Molinero, they were subjected to a different kind of blast: that of fire and chemical attack, before being in turn bombarded with bright, even garish colors (Croûûte criarde saison rose, 2021).

In an attempt to reunite these two divergent paths, three artists have finally integrated tagging into their art: Stéphane Couturier, who surveys cities to photograph construction sites marked by tags in his Urban Archaeologies images (Paris - Eole - 1, 1996); Michel Dector, who returns to painting after having favored duo performance art in the public space, without ever having used the spray can, sees in its use the means of “bringing the street into the personal space” of his canvases (Untitled, 2021); and Pablo Tomek, who has been using aerosol since his early days, first practicing on the walls of the towns and suburbs around him, faithful to the “gesture of contamination”, to bring the tag into his own painting. Playing with the codes of the Support-Surface group and the legacy of Simon Hantaï, his Plié-déplié series is a magnificent tribute to them (MEA-plié déplié-Diam's, 2024).