From the guerrilla of signs
Jacques Villeglé began his studies at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Rennes, where he met Raymond Hains. From 1947 to 1949 he studied architecture in Nantes, then moved to Paris.
In 1949 he became a collector of torn posters, calling himself a "poster artist" and proclaiming the "guerrilla war of signs.
In 1958, he wrote a report on the torn posters entitled "Des Réalités collectives", prefiguring the manifesto of the New Realism. In 1960, after their joint participation in the first Paris Biennale, Villeglé joins the New Realists, of which he is a founding member; this movement decrees "new perceptive approaches to the real" and is rooted, for Villeglé, in an art that aims to be non-technical and close to what one finds in the street. He tears down posters torn by time and anonymous hands, glimpsing the part of them that constitutes a natural work of art. He thus changes their status.
He continues in this way, from 1969, with the socio-political cryptograms, graffiti of walls of which he makes an alphabet and texts.
His first personal exhibition was organized in 1959.
Since then, Villeglé's work has been shown in more than a hundred solo exhibitions and in countless group shows around the world.
He talks with art critic and curator Catherine Francblin.
