Paris à l’arraché - Jacques Villeglé et l’art urbain

On the occasion of the centenary of Jacques Villeglé's birth (27 March 1926, Quimper – 6 June 2022, Paris), the Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris Museum presents the exhibition Paris à l’arraché. Jacques Villeglé and Urban Art.

An artist on the French scene, Jacques Villeglé develops a distinctive approach characterized by the extraction of posters from the urban space. Through these fragments torn from the walls of Paris, he transforms the ephemeral traces of the city into a visual language that is at once poetic and documentary. His work invites discovery of the city’s history through shredded posters or graphic signs that he reconstitutes. It also allows exploration of his links with the multiple expressions of contemporary urban art.

The exhibition is organized as a path through ensembles structured around Jacques Villeglé's vision, gathered in his writings. His works are juxtaposed with photographs, sound archives, music, film excerpts, interviews and testimonies, among which are many unpublished documents.

The exhibition focuses on his practice situated at the crossroads of poetry and urban archaeology. Paris is, for him, an open‑air studio, where every wall conceals a work in the making. Villeglé's wanderings invite visitors to traverse four districts in which he particularly drew, from Porte Maillot to Saint-Germain-des-Prés, via the Montparnasse district and finally the Marais. The exhibition also reveals the historical dimension of Villeglé's work, which captures real snapshots of the urban space of a given era. These displays evoke the political context, the struggles and mobilizations, local or national elections: the streets of Paris reflect a society traversed by multiple upheavals. By selecting and dating these posters, whom he places and dates, Jacques Villeglé, who readily describes himself as a “historian-releveur,” gathers material that keeps the memory of the tremors of history and of the upheavals of the world.