11 February 2011 – 25 March 2011
Jacques Villeglé a major UK exhibition, and a selection of work from the past three decades.
“I saw in New York a photograph by Walker Evans that showed a torn poster from 1930 with a caption that said roughly, “It is necessary to photograph the world the way people see it.” This is very close to my concern. To do just that – without translating.” Jacques Villeglé.*
Villeglé is one of the most prolific ‘Nouveau Réalists’. Although his work has spanned more than seven decades, his technique remains timeless. He established the ‘décollage’ method, and has used it extensively throughout his career. Even though the pieces have been produced since the mid 1980s the subject matter remains current.
Villeglé’s process involves taking what we digest in our everyday visual
surroundings and translating it directly through his chosen medium of décollage. His intervention is minimal. He uses found materials that are already in the street so there is always an inexhaustible supply of interesting new matter that is readily accessible to him. Each artwork carries an element of mystery with it, so the audience struggle to discover the missing pieces of torn ephemera, much like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle.
As part of the ‘Nouveau Réalisme’ group and with links to Dadaism, Villeglé takes elements of the world around him and incorporates them within his work, which merges both everyday life and art. The combination of different advertising material and branded logos produce an onslaught of media iconography within each work, that set to reinforce the idea that we are constantly bombarded by these mass-produced images and items in everyday life. Though by recycling the subject matter of advertising and urban themes from the different eras in which they were designed he emphasises their rarity and gives an account of the reality at that time.
*Interview with Bernard Goy, Journal of Contemporary Art, Inc. and the authors.
