Shortly after the Liberation, he moved alone to Paris where he lived modestly in a hotel on Rue du Jour, near Les Halles. From that time, he became close to an active group of painters (including Maurice Garrigues) who met at Atelier 7 in Castres in the Tarn region, where he met Christian d'Espic, Paul Enjalbert, Maurice Laboye, Jacques Villon, Hans Bellmer, and others. But even at that time, he exhibited at the Galerie Arnaud in Paris among the young generation of lyrical abstractionists: Zao Wou-Ki, Soulages, Gauthier, Debré, Fichet, Lanskoy...
In 1963, Michel Carrade joined the Galerie Jeanne Bucher (until the 1980s) at the invitation of its then director, Jean-François Jaeger. He held his first solo exhibition there, which proved to be as promising as those at the Galerie Arnaud (which he was then forced to leave), leading to other exhibitions abroad and in France, while Jean Guiraud worked to make Carrade known in Belgium. Having kept in touch with Claude Parent since 1951, Carrade introduced him to Paul Virilio and, with the sculptor Morice Lipsi, became involved in the Architecture Principe adventure, a movement that advocated, through its eponymous review (and various architectural interventions and realizations by Parent and Virilio), a principle of obliquity for an architecture that favors circulation (instead of traumatizing it with vertical lines colliding with horizontal ones). This group was called Architecture Oblique. This is cited, among others, by Roger Taillibert in his speech of March 15, 2006, for the reception of Claude Parent at the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Section Architecture). As his painting evolved towards a simple play of colors intended to produce the resulting light, he participated in many other exhibitions, notably with his friend, the writer Charles Juliet. In 1967, he became a professor of fine arts at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Architecture section UP6. In 1968, he organized with the painter Albert Chaminade, his colleague and drawing teacher at the École alsacienne, the exhibition "From Play to Sign" at the ARC Department, the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris.