It is necessary to distinguish different trends in the use of the figure in the art of these years. There is a “ wild ” trend, which affirms a spontaneous position with respect to creation and a radical doubt about the hierarchy of values: Combas, Boisrond and Di Rosa take over the world of comics to make it act in their paintings: the sphere of everyday life., aggression, monsters and freedom of composition are among their salient features; these artists have made their apprenticeship in the field and little by little their painting has gained in quality, contradicting in some way the intuition and instinct that he had taken as a guide. J.-M. Alberola, J.-Ch. Blais, G. Garouste and L. the Groumellecs represent the chic side (C.. They lay the roots of their art and find their subjects in the cultured universe of art history: works of citation, but of wise quotations, with elaborate traditional techniques in Garouste, which develops different mythological cycles, personal as L’Indien or literary like the careful reading of Dante ‘s Divine Comedy. Although he paints on torn posters, Blais mentions Matisse, Malevič and Léger from the beginning, especially in the works exhibited at the exhibition organized by B. Lamarche Vadel, who in 1981 presented these painters for the first time with the title Finir en beauté: the end of an era and the promise of another.

If the presence of the ” explicit ” figure is characteristic of the painting of the Eighties, even on an international level, it is veiled, fragmented and hidden in the works of artists who have been influenced or taught by Support-Surface. Thus for A.-M. Pecheur a complex network of shapes or colored settings conceals fragments of figures derived from a repertoire ranging from comics to Catalan Romanesque paintings: nothing more is visible of these origins, only a swarm of color animates the surface pictorial. D. Gauthier introduces the figure that bursts into the abstract process of pictorial composition in a more striking and baroque way. Fragment of stories, the figure,obligatory partner of a new pictorial approach to the outlet of modernism. Both young artists such as B. Pifaretti and Y. Reynier, and not so young ones such as France Rouan, use it as elements of the pictorial structure through the weaving. Others use it as an element at the same time dissociated from the composition and revealing of the pictorial technique, an emergence from magma in Dalbis, an exaggerated quotation in L. Cane or a subtle play of transparencies and production mechanisms of drawing in Buraglio. This tendency of French art, the product of a movement which in previous years concentrated the perenniality of painting on itself, is linked to a pictorial tradition of the 1950s that was rediscovered and re-evaluated.

It must be emphasized that the role of communication or immediate political or social message attributed to pictorial figuration in the 1960s has been abandoned even by those who had once been close to realism or hyperrealism such as G. Gasiorowski. Died in 1986, in the last years of his life he concentrated his reflection on a kind of equivalence between the pictorial gesture and regression, building or exorcising through his work an intimate and personal mythical world: the social discourse was replaced by the individualistic one of ‘artist. Others, on the contrary, have exalted the pleasure of doing: J. Le Gac (b.1936), working in the seventies on a real / imaginary discourse on the life of a painter, of which many features are autobiographical, naïves of the readings of his childhood, as if the sole purpose of art was to produce these pleasant and obsolete images. The mysterious work of a fictitious archeology for A. (b. 1942) and P. Poirier (b. 1942) has been transformed in recent years into a theatrical seduction of materials that evokes the ancient world. Sarkis (b.1938), ” captain ” of an army of signs, of which he weaves the networks of meanings, from the ” war treasure ” to the mythical ” Lulu ”, creates a work of which every manifestation enriches the global sense, at the same time personal and disenchanted discourse on the world. J.-P. Bertrand, who once stared anodyne events in short films (raindrops, changes of light),

One of the great debates of the 1970s concerned photography and its configuration as art. In the 1980s, some artists used photography and the procedures it allows to create as artistic means. Alongside Ch. Boltanski, Le Gac and numerous others, episodically, use it either as a construction for the presentation of reality, or as a privileged means of producing images; photography is used in mixed media with painting or other forms to produce the rising or disappearing of images.

According to ezinereligion, photography is also used as a tool for narratives or fantasies. G. Rousse paints geometric shapes or figures that only photography is able to convey from his privileged point of view. The resulting effect is that of an ambiguity between the photographic and the pictorial accentuated by the very large size of the prints and the flamboyant color of the Cibachrome.