This dissertation investigates the imbrications between narrative and literality on the painting of Kerry James Marshall (American), Luc Tuymans (Belgian), and Mamma Andersson (Swede), focusing on their works from the lat 1980s until the mid 2010s. It observes the way these paintings simultaneously invite the spectator to the interior of their narratives and confront him with the literal dimension of their material presence. Like many other pictorial productions of the last decades, the work of the three artists comes from images of different visual and textual medias, the content of which is re-elaborated on a kind of painting that, in a self-reflexive manner, comments its own tradition, alluding to its role as an institution, its declared obsolescence, and its plastic capacities.Marshall's painting elaborates on this comment consciously, in works where not only the theme but the choice of material, the colors, and the types of brushwork refer to specific, and frequently contradictory, procedures, of art history. Prioritizing the figuration of black people in his oeuvre, he inserts them onto this complex context of ocidental painting, from Renaissance to modernism, which has simultaneously excluded and founded itself upon their repression.The work of Tuymans comprehends painting as an anachronistic practice, and seeks to demonstrate its obsolescence in the very appearance of his dimmed pictures. His work always comes from previous images, from which the historical sense is diluted and fragmented but remains latent on the final oeuvres. On Andersson's paintings, there is a noticeable concern with the plastic material itself, and its possibilites; the one of creating spaces and suggesting narratives as much as the one in which it emphasizes itself as paint and brushwork. Her oeuvre frequently plays with combinations between these two realms, always starting with photographs which are projected onto the canvas and traced.