Raymond Hains liked to use the name of a feudal practice of confiscation – the droit d’aubaine, an expression long since fallen into disuse – to designate the practice by artists in the 1960s of arbitrarily appropriating a common good and proclaiming it their property and trademark. […] This appropriation is in no way the result of an arbitrary or calculated decision: Stämpfli came to focus his painting on imitating tyre treads only after a slow process, in which intuition and visual exploration, not calculation, played an essential role. In 1962, he abandoned abstract expressionism (which he was still practicing when he arrived in Paris in 1959) in favour of elegant, sparing, realist !guration, contemporary with the paintings of Tom Wesselmann, one of the leading figures in American Pop art, though not always adequately recognised as such today. For seven years, he focused on images of everyday life, gradually paring down his paintings to only green or white backgrounds: during this period of maturation, he tightened both his framing […] and his field of exploration, reducing it first to the automobile, then to wheels, and finally to tyres.

Excerpt from a text by Didier Semin published in the exhibition catalogue