Étienne Chambaud's artistic approach is nourished by his practice as a reader and the notion of intertextuality. It calls into question the modernist postulate of a work which is sufficient in itself by insisting on its historical and semantic inscription in a larger creative scheme. It is no longer a simple object made available to the spectator's gaze, but the result of everything that preceded it. It never functions in isolation but finds its meaning or its interest in a permanent dialogue with other works. They thus enrich each other to gradually draw the vague contours of a constellation of common references. They function like palimpsests which keep the trace of a previous work while proposing a new composition, thus oscillating endlessly between an inevitable repetition and a horizon each time renewed.