  We present the min-max construction of critical points of the area using
penalization arguments. Precisely, for any immersion of a closed surface
$\Sigma$ into a given closed manifold, we add to the area Lagrangian a term
equal to the $L^q$ norm of the second fundamental form of the immersion times a
"viscosity" parameter. This relaxation of the area functional satisfies the
Palais-Smale condition for $q>2$. This permits to construct critical points of
the relaxed Lagrangian using classical min-max arguments such as the mountain
pass lemma. The goal of this work is to describe the passage to the limit when
the "viscosity" parameter tends to zero. Under some natural entropy condition,
we establish a varifold convergence of these critical points towards a
parametrized integer stationary varifold realizing the min-max value. It is
proved in a recent work in collaboration with A.Pigati that parametrized
integer stationary varifold are given by smooth maps exclusively. As a
consequence we conclude that every surface area minmax is realized by a smooth
possibly branched minimal immersion.
