When we reached downtown Paris, it was 2:30 a.m., and Pavlensky was looking for a bar in which to celebrate. He had a wad of bank notes, money that had been returned to him by prison authorities on his release, and though he usually doesn’t drink, he wanted to treat everyone to a few rounds of vodka shots.

“Where to?” asked Stéphane.

The Place de la Bastille, of course, Pavlensky said. It fit his philosophy of resistance that we go to the one place that he and Shalygina were forbidden from going. Stéphane parked on a side street. Even at that hour, the Place de la Bastille was lined with police cars. Stéphane wondered aloud how long Pavlensky would manage to stay out of prison — a month?

“A happy month,” he replied.

We stopped outside the Banque de France, so Oksana and Pyotr could examine the aftereffect of “Lighting.” It had cost 18,000 euros to repair the damage, the bank claimed in its civil suit.

“Not bad — 18,000 euros for a work of art,” Pavlensky reflected. “It’s beautiful, the Place de la Bastille, one of the most beautiful places in Paris. But not a good place for a bank.”

In January, Pavlensky returned to court and was given a three-year prison sentence. The 11 months he spent in pretrial detention were credited as time served; the remaining two years were suspended. The couple were fined roughly $25,000, for material and “moral” damage. Pavlensky says he has no plans to pay it.

Since his release, he told me in an email, his personal life has been “catastrophic”: Shalygina ended their 12-year relationship, throwing him into what he termed a “double exile.” (She and their two daughters are fine, she reports in a Facebook message, but she doesn’t wish their current lives to be part of this article, or to comment on her breakup with Pavlensky.) His new partner is a Frenchwoman whom he describes as his “antithesis” — “an icon of bourgeois prudence” with “a big apartment in the prestigious 16th arrondissement.” It’s a “tragic love,” he said, doomed by contradiction.

Pavlensky’s work, however, is thriving. He recently took part in half a dozen of the gilets jaunes protests, in which shops, newspaper kiosks and even a Rouen branch of the Banque de France were set ablaze — an act he regards as a tribute to “Lighting.” For Pavlensky, the French state’s response to his artwork confirmed his central thesis: Institutions of power are oppressive, yet they are also oddly vulnerable to someone who denies their legitimacy. He is now at work documenting the government’s contribution to “Lighting” — the CCTV images, court transcripts, letters from the prison authorities that constitute the larger artwork. All his work, Pavlensky says, reveals that society at large may be a prison, but it is still possible to exert a kind of negative liberty. “Everything in my art is done to make people think. It’s not enough just to have your own individual freedom; you need to help others free themselves.”