Catalog designed as a tribute to Jacques Villeglé’s insatiable curiosity, exploring his relationship with the world of entertainment (cinema, dance, theater and music) from the 1950s to the end of his career, with texts by Julie Chaizemartin, Emma Lavigne, and Jeff Mills.

“Over the past two years, my mentality has changed in terms of the choice and framing of the posters I collect. Previously, I was keen to distract from the commercial or political aspect. The slogan, the brand name of the product became illegible, the smile of the star or politician had to be disfigured. When I picked up posters from painting exhibitions, even if I held the exhibited painter in high esteem, despite the distorting irony provided by the tears, I had the feeling of being confined to my own milieu as a visual artist.
On the contrary, this new thematic series I’ve undertaken to assemble on the subject of itinerant music groups, rappers and rockers, makes me feel quite at ease. The redundancy of their names, so sparsely hatched and legible most of the time, is for me a transmission of information that doesn’t bother me at all.
In this way, I hope to create a bridge between two milieus which, although they rub shoulders, know little about each other and hardly ever see each other. In the same way, I hope to encourage their different audiences to become involved in an art form that may have been indifferent to them.”
Jacques Villeglé

Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Galerie Vallois, Paris, 2024.
A member of the Nouveaux Réalistes and a friend of Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé (1926-2022), a pioneer of urban art, established himself first and foremost as a “collector” of posters peeled off walls, torn up and reorganized to appropriate these “reflections of the dominant culture” and bring out their abstract typographic components.