Member of the New Realism Movement, he was the inventor with Raymond Hains of the Affichism, whose raw material is on the walls of cities. He died on June 6 at the age of 96.
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The artist Jacques Villeglé died Monday June 6 in Paris, at 96, announced Tuesday the Center Pompidou. His name and his work are inseparable from the movement of new realism and those of Raymond Hains (1926-2005), both having been together the inventors of the poster, whose raw material is, as this name suggests, on the walls of cities.
Born on March 27, 1926 in Quimper under the name of Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé, later abbreviated in Villeglé, he enrolled in 1944 at the School of Fine Arts in Rennes, where he soon met Hains, his exact contemporary. In 1947, when he was now an architecture student in Nantes, he worked in Saint-Malo, where the traces of the Second World War and the Atlantic Wall abound, and began to collect debris. These are the steel-shoe sons of the corsairs, which Hains has repeatedly said that they announced new realism ten years in advance. These are indeed found objects, Ready-Made therefore, insofar as the intervention of the artist is limited to their collection and their staging according to the principles of Marcel Duchamp; But they are chosen for their expressive power, unlike indifference claimed by Duchamp.
Lacéré posters
Having renounced architecture in 1949, Villeglé comes to settle in Paris, where Hains has already exhibited his indecipherable photographs taken with an objective of fluted glass, the hypnagogoscope, and where they share a workshop until 1954 . Their first common work dates from that same year: Ach Alma Manetro, a frieze of lacerated posters marouflaged on canvas 2.56 meters long. The words are not very readable, their superposition impenetrable and the major idea of the poster already present: to tear the traces of all the news from the moment, degraded by rain or passers -by from the walls and palisades. The intervention must be limited to the uprooting and the laceration, which reveals the overlays of paper.
From this moment to its last operations of this type, half a century later, in 2001, Villeglé did not compromise on these rules and made this method the instrument of a chronicle of the Contemporary France. In these samples which are entitled to the street and the date of their capture, there are countless political allusions, from the Algerian war in May 68 and to the subsequent presidential campaigns; As many to the most varied commercial advertisements, to those of the “Minitel Rose”; Social motifs, such as the Bal de l’Ecole Polytechnique; and artistic subjects, from posters for exhibitions of ancient or contemporary art, including the new realism itself.
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