Jacques Villeglé
Retrospective

Jacques Villeglé is the most important living French artist. His works are exhibited at MoMa (New York), Tate Gallery (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and in the biggest museums all over the world, from Germany to Argentina, from Israel to Venezuela and more. In 2008 the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou consecrates his work with an important retrospective. Currently his works are exhibited at Musée Tinguely in Basel and soon at Schirn Kunsthalle of Frankfurt. The Jacques Villeglé’s exhibition at Partners&Mucciaccia Gallery in Singapore, presents the Nouveau Réaliste artist’s work, through a retrospective made by more than 50 artworks, from the “décollages d’affiches” of the Sixties, to the last ripped posters realized in the 2000, including also recent works elaborated with his socio-politics signs technique. The exhibition highlights the innovative nature of the “recycling techniques” , the artist’s favourite ones, that allowed him to understand the world by an anarchic and poetic point of view. He stoles from the urban culture a piece of living matter, and gives it back to us in the form of a canvas. These works established an extremely different and original language. In 1949 Jacques Villeglé, with his friend Raymond Hains, invented the décollage: the appropriation of ripped posters. In Paris, both had the idea of take hold of this ordinary matter. Starting from that moment, Jacques Villeglé takes over the posters as a predator does with his prey. The artist chooses an object to rip for several reasons: the matter, the subject, the image, the chromatisms. After a quick individuation, Jacques Villeglé sets the artwork mentally. The gesture of appropriation, serving the gaze, is quick and even violent. Jaques captures, steals what the eye notices, than he tosses on his plunder. In 1961, his work is identify into the Nouveaux Réalistes movement. For everybody, Villeglé is a Nouveau Réaliste artist, rather an affichist, a term which characterizes the use of a matter posted up as a creative vehicle, has Raymond Hains, François Dufrêne and Mimmo Rotella also did. History classify him for that crucial encounter; also the historians mentioned that moment as the essential one for the artist career. His belonging in affichistes group represents the base of his adventure, mixed with the story of the Nouveau Réalisme movement, in which he participate in a decisive way. There’s a Jacques Villeglé before the affichistes (1948-1960, when he starts working with Raymond Hains); a Jacque Villeglé into the Nouveaux Réalistes group (1960-1968) and a Jaques Villeglé independent and free, focus on a research made by himself, built starting from the ripped posters took over time from the streets of Paris, Buenos Aires and many other place. Villeglé is witness of an urban art which never deny and which allowed him to realize a clear work around specific themes, always introducing new interpretation of the time. Jacques Villeglé has been carrying on catching posters until the years 2000, but with a new technique called “socio-politics signs”. This technique allows him to explain the world through a personal language that transfigures the ordinary reality in an odd and colourful novel about the world. Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé, lives and works in Paris. He’s born in Quimper (Finistère, France) on 1926. His favourite city is Saint-Malo. Despite his international fame, he’s kind, willing, often moody when he starts to tell his artistic and human adventure. Villeglé is a man of memory and culture, who loves recall his important encounter of the past, with the most important personalities from the Fifties to nowadays. This radical, avant-gard mentor, already consecrated after his retrospective at Centre Pompidou, pursues his happiness with deep lucidity. He’s the only French artist to whom the New York MoMA dedicates an exhibition. He’s great in his personal way, discreet and reserved…he is Villeglé.

The exhibition will take place in presence of the artist.