Alain Jacquet

Perrotin is delighted to host the first exhibition by Alain Jacquet upon representation of the Estate. This major presentation, spanning several decades of the artist’s carrer, is displayed on all three gallery spaces in Marais and was conceived in close association with the family of the artist.

Alain Jacquet (1939 in Neuilly-sur-Seine –2008 in New York) emerged as a contemporary artist during the remarkable boom in image reproduction techniques. Spanning from his first abstract canvases to his mechanically generated paintings (via silkscreen printing or computer), he continuously experimented with techniques throughout his career yielding an impressive oeuvre of various forms and media. Guided by diverse principles, Jacquet demonstrated an incredible capacity for ingenuity with the examination between abstraction and figuration; the ‘latent image’ within both collective and individual memory; and the appropriation of images from contemporary popular culture and iconic works showcased in museums. On a quest to address the fundamental laws of the universe.

From his debut in 1961 working in dialogue with American pop artists to the Mec'Art period, through his Braille and Visions de la Terre series—which anticipated appropriationist art and simulationism. Today, his work echoes a new generation of artists for whom images do not constitute a redoubling of the world but the environment in which every individual is. Producing variation within repetition, Alain Jacquet presents the viewer with the copies of copies of a world saturated with signs : Such is the horizon that Alain Jacquet proposes to us.

Alain Jacquet (1939-2008) started his career in the early 1960s and is known for his artworks lying between pop art and conceptual art. At that time, culture and mass consumption imposed itself in the West, stimulated by a flow of advertisements and advertisements of all kinds. To this collective conduct, pop art responds with the roundabout use of its techniques. Advertising, comics and road signs invest an iconography whose watchword is “democratization”, as opposed to elitist culture in art. For Alain Jacquet, art must fit into the heart of everyday reality. It is industrial development and technical progress that allow Alain Jacquet to develop such an aesthetic. Jacquet gradually brings the codes op Pop Art to France when he begins to use the technique of screen printing, which is a mechanical reproduction. This technique, used especially for advertisings, is the begining of the point, a recurring pattern in Jacquet’s work. Jaquet’s work has been subject of numerous retrospectives, and is in more than 40 museums and public permanent collections.