Exhibition to the centre Pompidou Jacques Villeglé

A particular approach of a street entertainment which expresses itself by the Laceration and of takeoff of posters Of September 7th, 2008 - January 5th, 2009

Jacques Villeglé is originally a painter. He studies to the art college of Rennes where he(it) gets acquainted of Raymond Hains who will follow him all the life. He works as A to he gets acquainted with the questions of town planning and public space, before studying the architecture. In 1947 he begins to harvest on the seasides fragment, twisted chains, at which he considers as sculptures.

To leave 1949 he directs his appropriatif behavior to the only torn up posters. For him, the real artist is " lacérateur unknown person ", the collection which can be made by whoever: he so announces the moment of the disappearance of the face of the artist, giving up the place(square) to the "collector" or the collector. " The taking, he says, is the parallel of the centring of the photographer ", and himself wants, as Hains, simple collector of fragments whom he is only choosing and signing. In 1958 he drafts a development on the torn up posters entitled By The collective Realities, the prefiguration of the manifesto of the New Realism considered as the historian of Torn up unknown person, entity which he creates in 1959.

The exhibition of the Centre Pompidou collects more than hundred of works of the 1940s in our days. He approaches in a thematic way the course of the artist since the typographic explosion and the big abstract compositions colored with the debuts, until the recent rhythmic juxtapositions stemming from posters of concerts.

He limits voluntarily his plastic initiative in the taking of torn up posters, then in their transfer on painting, so making exist anonymous and collective productions in the world of the art.


Jacques Villeglé is not an author of " ready-made ", even if he does not intervene (except by rare "helps") on the posters which he takes in streets for maroufler from painting. his work consists rather in letting appear from the urban chaos the beauties hidden in the thicknesses of paper torn by anonymous hands, which sometimes also wrote on posters or dirtied them.

The poster modifies according to the successive humors, its message deteriorates and mixs to those of the posters which it covered until become illegible. Fragments of lower coats(layers) appear, provoking on the surface a carrier chaos of colors and signs of affects: a new plastic language appears which converts the surface of the poster in a symbolic arena messages of which would quarrel the ascendancy.