Painting is art to use pigments to trace on a surface of the images constituting a coherent unit carrying direction. Spots painted on rollers of site prehistoric of Farmhouse-of Azil, where the pure sign is not indissociable stone which carries it, with works of the group Supports/Surfaces of the years 1970, during millenia, it is a whole pictorial language which is set up, then is closed again on itself not to be any more but one mirror of the only artistic step.

Pictorial space defines work, its contents, its direction. The supports and the techniques used are related to this space, and their employment is not always generating of evolution for the pictorial language. The practice of the oil-base paint allowed the sfumato (modelled intended to suggest nuances), but painting out of tube, if it supported the development of the painting of outdoor, therefore did not create it.

It is well rather the power of the images and the color and their bonds ambiguities with reality which constitute the history of painting. The field of painting knows a geographical and chronological extension which follows so to speak that of humanity. It includes practices with the techniques and the extremely various functions.

Dyeing of rocou whose Oyampis of Guyana coat the body with paintings decorating the catacombs of Rome to I ^er century, of the painted silk banners of the marchioness of Dai in China of the VII ^E front century J. - C. with the frescos of the house of the Mysteries with Pompéi (I ^er front century J. - C.), of the faces of insane seized by Géricault with the Clarinet of Georges Braque (1913), the term of “painting” recovers a multiple reality of which it is not possible to return account in a homogeneous way.

One can however define what the Occident called “painting” since Antiquity: which techniques were used, which speeches accompanied these techniques, which place granted each culture to him which followed one another.