Jacques VILLEGLÉ

Biography

Jacques Villeglé was born into a family of the old bourgeoisie: the Mahé de Villeglé family, on March 27, 1926 in Quimper.

He studied painting and drawing at the School of Fine Arts in Rennes.

He worked for some time with an architect, where he familiarized himself with questions of town planning and public space, before studying architecture in the fine arts of Nantes (January 1947-December 1949).

In 1947, he began to collect debris from the Atlantic Wall in Saint-Malo, which he regarded as sculptures.

In 1958, he wrote an update on the lacerated posters entitled "Collective Realities", foreshadowing the manifesto of New Realism. In 1960, after their joint participation in the first Paris Biennale, Jacques Villeglé joined the group of New Realists of which he was one of the founding members (Martial Raysse, Yves Klein, Arman, Tinguely, Hains, Dufrêne, Spoerri); this movement decrees "new perceptual approaches to reality" and is anchored, for Villeglé, in an art which wants to be non-technical and close to what one finds in the street. He tears down posters lacerated by time and anonymous hands, glimpsing the part which, in them, constitutes a work of natural art. It thus changes their status. It will continue in this way, from 1969, with the socio-political cryptograms, graffiti of walls of which it makes an alphabet and texts.

Since 1957, the date of its first exhibition at the Colette Allendy gallery (Paris), Villeglé's selective work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions in Europe, America, Asia and Africa. The artist participated in collective events on five continents.