Continuing to July 3, 2025
Even though he was trained as an architect, Jacques Villeglé worked as a civil servant inspecting building sites around his native Brittany and ultimately Paris during the 1950s. In the postwar French capital, he had constant exposure to construction fencing plastered with layers of posters. These weathered surfaces became his canvases. As Villeglé explained, “I began to see them as paintings made by anonymous hands.”
Building on modernist practices such as Cubist collage, Duchamp’s readymades, and Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, Villeglé pushed further, removing his own hand from the artmaking process to allow the hivemind of the street to dictate form. “I wanted to make it clear,” he once said in reference to the practice of décollage, “that our work didn’t come out of Cubist collage as practiced by Braque and Picasso — nor out of Kurt Schwitters’ work — but out of reality, the street itself.” He found special validation in the prophetic words of Surrealist poet Léo Mallet, who had predicted in 1934: “Soon the collage will be executed without scissors, without razor, without glue … It will take its place on the walls of the city, an unlimited field of poetic realizations.”
Too young to participate in the war or the waning Dada and Surrealist movements, Villeglé aligned more readily with postwar vanguards like Lettrism and Situationism (themselves reactions to Dada and Surrealism). Both favored typographic innovation and acts of détournement, that is, redirecting of existing entertainment, commercial, and political material toward a novel creative impact. The Situationist practice of the dérive, or unplanned urban drifting, resonated with Villeglé’s own intuitive wanderings. Between 1949 and 2003, he produced over 4,500 décollage works extracted from all twenty Parisian arrondissements. He removed wall fragments from the street and preserved them on canvas, capturing the changing language of urban life. His use of found materials eventually attracted the attention of art critic Pierre Restany, who brought him into the Nouveaux Réalism (New Realism) group that also included Yves Klein, Arman, and Jean Tinguley, among others.
The current exhibition presents 24 works the artist produced between 1958 and 1997. “Quai de la Rapée” (1963) shows Villeglé’s early reliance on Lettrist typographical design. “In those days,” he recalled, “the cinema and concert posters rarely had images — just words — and they had been torn and shredded to where they became something else, with a post-Cubist look.” Forty years later, “FFF, les dessous de Saint-Caprais-Agen” (1997) reflects the changing tempo of Parisian nightlife. Here, Villegelé creates a more fully realized work that is both repetitive and chaotic, encompassing a wider array of contemporary media, including photography, stickers and flyers. In “Puteaux” (1989) we can see Villeglé’s dependence on structure to hold together a tangle of typographic and pictorial design. “Métro République (1964) exemplifies how the artist unifies the composition by found color and a fractured geometry connected by words and letters floating across the picture plane. ”I am always attracted to colors,” he once said, “but I always seek structure because life should be structured. You can say my aesthetic is a quest for structure.” The aesthetic question with Villeglé, then, is always to what degree that structure is found and to what degree imposed.
After a first visit to the exhibition, I conducted my own dérive through the mean streets of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Walking toward a Geary St. bus stop, I passed the shuttered Mitchell Brothers building on O’Farrell St. Spilling from an overflowing trash can onto the sidewalk were freshly torn posters stripped from the adjacent wall. The remaining ten-foot remnant was a record of contemporary San Francisco, bearing the admonition, “Get it together SF,” and touting the appearance of DJ Trauma. It perfectly echoed Villeglé’s vision, the random, anonymous, poetic collision of text, time, and texture. Upon my return a week later, the scene had shifted. The tattered posters were gone, replaced by crisp concert ads. Ephemerality had taken its course — and would again. It was pure Villeglé, the prophet of fleeting street culture, architect of the uncurated city, documentarian of a vanished visual history.
