Paris à l'arraché. Jacques Villeglé et l'art urbain

Musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris

On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Jacques Villeglé (27 mars 1926, Quimper – 6 juin 2022, Paris), the musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris presents the exhibition « Paris à l'arraché. Jacques Villeglé et l'art urbain ». A major artist of the French scene, Jacques Villeglé developed a singular approach characterized by the removal of posters from urban space. Through these fragments torn from the walls of Paris, he transforms the city's ephemeral traces into a unique visual language, both poetic and documentary. His prolific body of work invites the discovery of the city's history through lacerated posters or graphic signs that he recomposes. It also allows exploration of his connections with the many expressions of contemporary urban art. The exhibition is organized as a journey through groupings structured by Jacques Villeglé's vision, gathered from his own writings. His works are placed alongside photographs, sound archives, music, film excerpts, interviews, and testimonies, including numerous previously unpublished documents. The exhibition focuses on his practice, situated at the crossroads of poetry and urban archaeology. For him, Paris is an open-air studio, where every wall conceals a work in the making. Villeglé's wanderings invite visitors to cross four neighborhoods where he particularly gathered his materials, from the porte Maillot to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, passing through the Montparnasse district and finally the Marais. The exhibition also reveals the historical dimension of Villeglé's work, which captures true snapshots of urban space at a given time. These posters evoke the political context, the struggles and mobilizations, the local or national elections: the streets of Paris reflect a society shaken by multiple upheavals.

Source: Paris Open Data ↗