Jacques Villegle

Jacques Villeglé was born in Quimper in 1926. In 1947 in Saint-Malo, he started a collection of found objects including steel wires and waste from the Atlantic wall. In December 1949, he limits his appropriative behavior to lacerated posters. In June 1953, the “Hepérile Eclaté” phonetic poem by Camille Bryen was published, and was made illegible through the weft of glass spray of his intellectual partner Raymond Hains. On the 27th of October 1960, Arman, Klein, Raysse, Tinguely, Hains, Dufrêne, Spoerri and Villeglé sign the constitutive declaration of New Realism, that promulgates “new perceptive approaches of reality” and is anchored in a non-technical art, close to what we find in the street. He takes posters that were lacerated by time or anonymous hands on reserved or wild places, seeing in a blink the part within them that constitutes a natural art piece. Thus, he changes their status. With socio-politic cryptograms and wall graffiti he uses to create an alphabet and texts. 

Courtesy of Bernard Chauveau