French Artist Dies at 96 – RisePEI

Jacques Villeglé, an artist whose work made use of torn posters noticed on the road which have influenced generations of French artists, has died at 96.

The Paris-based Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, which represents Villeglé, introduced the artist’s dying in a statement posted to social media on Tuesday. The gallery remembered him as “working exhausting, smiling at all times.”

Villeglé was the final residing determine related to Nouveau Réalisme, a French avant-garde motion of the late Nineteen Fifties and early ’60s that sought a complete merger of life and artwork. Its progenitors—amongst them César, Arman, and Niki de Saint Phalle—typically made use of economic objects and promoting, which they eyed with suspicion, whereas additionally bringing the visible language of Summary Expressionism to the on a regular basis.

Villeglé’s major mode of expression throughout that period was the exhibition of ripped and distressed posters that he had noticed in Paris. He termed this follow décollagisme, though he was not typically the one who did this tearing—that was the work of passersby, who have been left nameless.

He described his works from this period as “a complete repertory of rips, scratches, slashes, scrawls, smears, gashes, gougings, abrasions, inscriptions and over-pastings.”

Typically, there was an explicitly political dimension to all this. In 1961, Villeglé made Carrefour Algérie-Evian, which reveals an advert for bottled water subsequent to signal expressing assist for Algeria in its warfare for independence. The work was a pun: Evian was each the title of a water firm and the city the place negotiations for a peace treaty between France and Algeria have been beginning that yr.

“What makes them greater than that’s their unusual, allusive poetry: a poetry of probability and on a regular basis life,” critic Michael Kimmelman as soon as wrote within the New York Instances. “They’re reminders of the worth of preserving one’s eyes open.”

Born in 1926 in Quimper, France, Villeglé initially began out making sculptures utilizing junk discovered on the seashores of Saint-Malo. Through the late ’40s, Villeglé linked up with the artist Raymond Hains, who turned an in depth good friend, and the 2 stumble on décollagisme. A few of their preliminary experiments, with their emphasis on appropriated and collaged textual content, have been linked to the Lettrist motion.

Following the uprisings of Might 1968, Villeglé started to concentrate on what he termed a “sociopolitical alphabet,” or a language system constructed utilizing closely stylized letters with leftist underpinnings (an A formed just like the image for anarchism, for instance). He additionally continued to supply décollagiste works, counting on commercials for musical occasions for one sequence, though on this case, Villeglé himself tore the commercials versus individuals on the road.

Through the ’60s, Villeglé’s work gained some visibility exterior France, having been included within the legendary 1961 “The Art of Assemblage” present on the Museum of Trendy Artwork in New York. Nonetheless, he stays a lot better-known inside his house nation than he does anyplace else. In 2008, the Centre Pompidou in Paris staged a retrospective of his work.

“Because of the virtually unique use of torn posters, this pioneer of city artwork leaves an ample physique of labor of astonishing formal richness,” the Centre Pompidou wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.