Jacques Villeglé
The Works
Rue Lafayette (AP19)
October 16, 1965
28.5 x 32.5 cm
Tear-off posters glued to canvas
The title and date of the work precisely indicate the location of the Paris street and the exact date on which Villeglé tore the remains of advertising posters torn down by anonymous hands from a wall.
In this specific case, the poster remnant is part of a Paris gallery’s advertisement for an exhibition by Georges Mathieu, one of the leading French Abstract Expressionist artists of the 1950s. The appropriation of the poster pieces also results in an abstract work, but one created unintentionally by anonymous abuse on the street.
The advertising poster was—and remains—the standard-bearer of consumer society. When torn from the street after being fortuitously defaced, fragments emerge from those beneath, allowing the viewer to play with the power of images composed by chance. Recomposed in the studio, they take on new life as works of art in the gallery, in the exhibition, and in the museum.
Barcelona
2002
Torn-out posters glued on canvas
75 x 51 cm
Jacques Villeglé’s work Barcelona is a relatively recent example of Villeglé’s work. Since 1949, he has torn up and appropriated advertising posters, mainly from Paris or other cities he visited, torn and defaced by anonymous hands on billboards, walls, and other street furniture.
His intervention as an artist is completed when, in his studio, he reassembles them, frames them, hangs them on a permanent support, and finally signs them. From that moment on, they take on a new life as works of art in institutional spaces: the gallery, the exhibition, and finally, the museum. At that moment, the “torn-out posters,” affiches lacerées, as he calls them, acquire an artistic status
Later, he would create the idea or mythical figure of the Anonymous Lacerator, an expression that serves to reinforce the idea of the unconscious existence of a collective spirit that unites all the anonymous artists who have torn down a poster at some point.
The artist
(Quimper, Bretagne, 1926 – Paris, 2022)
Jacques Villeglé was born in 1926 in Quimper (Brittany). A member of the Nouveaux réalistes group, he is a notable figure in the history of contemporary art. In the 1950s and 1960s, his work—along with that of other affichic artists and depicists such as Dûfrene, Hains, and Rotella—was the first European contribution to the development of a new artistic language after Dadaism and Surrealism.
At the same time, starting in 1959, Jacques Villeglé began taking notes of all the alphabetic signs he found in anonymous graffiti on all types of urban media.
This endless collection served him to create what he called socio-political alphabets. With them he created a personal typography with which he later created poetic, literary, artistic or political messages.
Villeglé was a founding member of the Nouveaux Réalistes group, promoted by critic Pierre Restany as a reaction against the academic abstraction of Paris in the years after World War II. Several artists experimented with appropriating the banal reality of domestic or urban life, technological and industrial. They worked with materials and objects produced by the consumer industry, diverting them from their original functions or recovering them from rejection. Irony or chance are often included in the manipulation of objects to propose different experiences and open up possibilities for reflection on the viewer’s everyday life.