"I became myself the day I dared to do certain things that I thought were forbidden. To create, you need a great freshness, a great naivety. What we call holy fire. You can lose yourself in the atelier; the material transforms you. Soon enough, one thing leads to another and so on. In reality, when you are an artist, you have fun."
César Baldaccini, known as César, is one of the founders of the New Realists group along with Yves Klein, Arman and Raymond Hains. Known for his sculptures, he is also a prolific draftsman. In defiance of the consumer society, César makes his compressions, in particular of various models of cars. By compressing an everyday object, he distances it from its usual function and invites us to look at it differently. Throughout his career he would thus compress all kinds of materials: fabrics, papers, and even gold jewelry that women across the world would bring him and which he compresses into a cube to wear around his neck. If César's compressions undoubtedly remain his most famous works, his "expansions", in contrast, made from polyurethane foam spread over a solidified-compressed surface, give rise to new artistic experiments and happenings in particular. The famous art critic Pierre Restany, close to the New Realists, would describe his work as a "poetic recycling of urban, industrial and promotional reality".