Apparition des figures standards brings together original drawings, animation film, prints and sound art. The face, understood as the image par excellence, is multiplied into a set of pictographic signs, as so many funny expressions or expressive types. These figures live alternately in the regime of the fixed image and in that of the animated image, which are given temporally in the films and spatially in the drawings. They are constantly being reincarnated on three supports: scroll, screen and book. Four main figures emerge from a vast corpus; their original forms are repeated, recomposed over time and broken-down in movement. The standard figures look like emojis, “facial” signs in instant messaging whose production and use are now global, and which tend to constitute, imperfectly, a universal iconic language; but they distance themselves from it in that their vibrations and metamorphoses free them from a limited grammar of emotions: these images exist for themselves. The figure, as form, but also as figura, face, becomes an icon, which we look at and which looks out at us, a surface through which the eye accedes to something invisible, the mystery of the human presence in any image.