Jacques Vieille
Born in 1948
Lives and works in Paris and Castelamouroux
Jacques Vieille was born in 1948 in Baden-Baden (Germany). He lives and works in Castelamouroux and Paris.
“It suffices to go back to the early 1980s, and visually leaf through Jacques Vieille’s works, to understand how this artist has perfectly understood the obsolescence of the Cartesian separation between nature and culture which underpins our conception of environmental protection. After the fact, some of his sculptures might even be read within an ecological perspective. Not in the sense of an ecological art with its rehabilitatory functionalism, but rather in the sense of an acute awareness of the fertile interrelation between natural systems and our society.
[…] Without being the standard bearer of any cause or party, Jacques Vieille very quickly grasped the ambivalence of nature and has expressed it not with pessimism but with a sense of projection which is rare in this field.
[…] Over the last three decades, the precise art of Jacques Vieille, with its minimalist modularity, has been forever reconsidering and redefining, with a great deal of intuition, what people are only just beginning to admit: nature is our culture.”
Excerpt from the essay by Bénédicte Ramade, “La nature de Jacques Vieille”, Documents d’artistes Nouvelle-Aquitaine, 2014
Translated by Simon Pleasance, 2015