Jacques Villeglé

Jacques Mahé de La Villeglé, otherwise known as Villeglé, carries in his surname the root of the urbanity that characterises the man and his work. Villeglé was born in Quimper in 1926 and studied at the School of Fine Arts in Rennes, where he met Raymond Hains in 1945. In the summer of 1947 in Saint-Malo, he began to collect found objects, such as steel wire, debris from the Atlantic Wall and catalogue samples. In December 1949, he moved to Paris and decided to restrict his collecting process to posters ripped by anonymous hands, entitling these found pieces with the name of the location where the theft initially took place (1). He became part of a collective of artists who, at Pierre Restany’s instigation, founded the Nouveaux Réalistes group, in which R. Hains, François Dufrêne and Villeglé represented the poster artists (affichistes) (2). From the 1960s to this day, a substantial bibliography has been published around the works of Villeglé, an artist who has been described in turn as a visual revolutionary, a wanderer, a collector artist, a robber, a pilferer, or a lacerator/literator (3). To this last epithet, one might readily add that of man of letters as a reminder of his interest in Lettrism and sound poetry, and to insist on the wonderful erudition found in his own writings (4) and his invention of a socio-political alphabet (5). However, simple chronology does not suffice if one is to understand and define his approach. As one goes back and forth permanently between Villeglé’s works and mixes up the dates, new analogies arise like the strata and junctions that each of his thefts uncovers. This comes as no surprise for an artist who has said that “Brittany is a region of inter-signs” (6). It forces observers of his work to undergo the mental gymnastics of subjective analogies, each of which makes them a “lacerated Anonymous” that further expands the rip. There is a sense of facetious trickery (“entourloupe”) in Villeglé’s work, as exemplified in his 1985 exhibition in Rennes, entitled Le Retour de l’Hourloupe (7) as a reference to the assonance that Jean Dubuffet associated with the word. The word “entourloupe”, short for “entourloupette”, only appeared in 1947 – a decisive year in Villeglé’s collecting journey. And trickery there was, for instance, with the Rue du Départ poster (dated 12 July 1968), which bears no mention of the street name, alongside the Gaité-Montparnasse poster (May 1987), which distinctly reads “rue du départ” – the title of a Tony Gatlif film. Quite the conundrum for the Latin Quarter. One might also mention the 1965 exhibition De Mathieu à Mahé and the 1995 Villeglé/Gilles Mahé collaborative show Prix choc, and thus multiply connections between names, dates or events. Not only does “Villeglé collect the addition of random actions”, as Bernard Lamarche-Vadel puts it (8), but he also allows each and one of us to reconnect with chance, to claim every vision for oneself and to sign it anonymously.

Danielle Robert-Guédon, Portrait, published in Critique d’art No. 30, autumn 2007.

Notes:

See: Felgine, Odile. Jacques Villeglé, Neuchâtel: Ides et Calendes, 2001; and more recently: “
Jacques Villeglé”, Paris: Flammarion (article No. 099, p. 66 in the abovementioned issue of Critique d'art) and “
Jacques Villeglé”, Knokke-Heist: Linda & Guy Pieters (article No. 098, p. 66).
See: Gli “Affichistes” tra Milano e Bretagna / les Affichistes entre Milan et la Bretagne: Dufrêne,
Villeglé, Rotella, Hains, Jorn Vostell, Wolman, Milan: Fondazione Gruppo Credito Valtellinese, 2005.
Skimao, “Un lacérateur, un littérateur”, Kanal Magazine, No. 31-32, 1987, p. 35
See for instance: Villeglé, Jacques. Urbi & Orbi, Mâcon: W, 1986, (Gramma).
Jacques Villeglé: graphismes socio-politiques, Luxembourg: Galerie Lucien Schwietzer, 2007.
Villeglé, Jacques. Cheminements 1943/1959, Saint-Julien-Molin-Molette: Les Sept Collines; 
Jean-Pierre Huguet, 1999.
Villeglé: le retour de l'Hourloupe, Rennes: Maison de la Culture, 1985.
Lamarche-Vadel, Bernard. Villeglé: la présentation en jugement, Paris: Marval; Galerie Fanny 
Guillon-Laffaille, 1990.