Jacques Villeglé

Diane Rosentein Gallery is happy to present a special installation of important décollages by Jacques Villeglé (FR, 1926 - 2022), the influential French affichiste and early appropriation artist. This project room presentation showcases eight works, dating from 1957 - 1987, by the late Nouveau Realist artist who was instrumental in bringing ‘the streetscape’ into the space of the exhibition.

Villeglé was the last living figure associated with Nouveau Réalisme, a French avant-garde movement of the late 1950s and early ’60s that sought a total merger of life and art. Its progenitors—among them César, Arman, and Niki de Saint Phalle—often made use of commercial objects and advertising, which they eyed with suspicion, while also bringing the visual language of Abstract Expressionism to the everyday.

From 1949 onward, Jacques Villeglé began systematically collecting scraps of posters torn from walls around town, inventing a brand-new artistic practice which in turn gave rise to a new type of work of art. This radical re-appropriation of an otherwise ordinary material enabled him to capture the spirit of the times and the image of a society driven by communication which expressed itself above all through its obsession with current affairs and the omnipresence of the media.

An early appropriation artist, Villeglé described himself as a ‘scavenger’ who spent most of his life wandering the streets of Paris, pulling torn advertising posters off the ancient walls, and pronouncing them Art. “In seizing a poster, I seize history,” he says. “What I gather is the reflection of an era.” He was an archivist using anonymous crowdsourcing to create art.

By 1961, his “torn posters” were included in the legendary ‘The Art of Assemblage’ show at MoMA. He received a retrospective from the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2008.

The artist wrote, “I anticipated that the eventual output of this series would surpass the production of the most imaginative of my generation’s painters, and that my a priori determination to focus on the oeuvre of a diffuse collectivity would give me greater freedom than any achieved by the artist facing a blank canvas.”