This painting belongs to the series Marionnettes de la ville et de la campagne [Marionettes of the City and the Country]. It reflects the maturity of an artist who incorporated all the defining features of his corpus—frontality, awkward drawing, and a free use of colour—while simultaneously transcending it through a profound manipulation of the materials used. Perspective has been rejected, and the objects are “transformed into pancakes, as though flattened by a pressing iron,” while the drawing suggests “the ancestral spontaneity of the human hand when it draws its signs.”

Lines of solid colour crisscross the canvas, outlining the silhouettes of passers-by as well as a map of the city. An invitation to drift, they evoke a sense of urban density and the infinite number of possible routes through the city. In the work of Gérard Fromanger, a major figure in the Figuration Narrative movement, the depiction of aimless passers-by wandering through a city is paired with a multicoloured palette that carries a Pop Art aesthetic.

In the early 1950s, Maurice Estève liberated himself from any sense of perspective, allowing soft, rounded, and elongated forms to intertwine to create an organic whole. In this composition, which evokes a marquetry of colors, deep reds, acidic yellows, and oranges predominate. These are contrasted by greens, blues, and blacks, which sometimes suggest the matter beneath the surface. The title Aoutane, a lexical invention referring to the summer period, reflects the artist's exploration of chromatic vibrations.