Jacques Villeglé: Jacques Villeglé, le flâneur

The exhibition focuses on walking and Villeglé’s relationship with Paris. His practice developed through walking the city and collecting fragments of posters from its streets and public spaces. Each décollage records the location and date of its discovery, turning the works into fragments of specific places and moments in Paris.

The exhibition brings together works spanning Villeglé’s career, from Pénélope (1950), an experimental film project made with Raymond Hains, to the torn posters produced between 1950 and 1991, the Placards de journaux (1976–1983), the Ardoises (2000–2007), and the self-portraits from Opération Quimpéroise (2006).

The surfaces of Villeglé’s works preserve traces of public life, including electoral campaigns, films, advertisements, cultural events, colonial conflicts, and commercial and political slogans. By removing fragments of posters from the city’s walls and presenting them as artworks, he incorporated elements of everyday urban life into his practice. The resulting works reflect the political, social and visual changes of post-war France, while drawing attention to the collective imagery found in the urban environment.