As part of the "Daniel Varenne II Collection" auction sell on Wednesday 28th October 2020, PIASA is offering collectors a selection of works of art by emblematic artists from the second half of the 20th century, including Alain Jacquet.
Alain Jacquet's famous "Camouflages" series, produced from 1962 to 1964, takes up the masterpieces of art history (from Michelangelo to Matisse and Bronzino) that Jacquet associates with iconic forms from consumer society, popular culture or advertising (Walt Disney's vignettes in particular), thus opposing classical culture and mass culture. This undertaking of mixing images and styles is also in line with the work of certain American Pop Art and French Nouveaux Réalistes artists, whose work was based on misappropriation, such as Roy Lichtenstein or Martial Raysse.
Jacquet's painting "Camouflage Lichtenstein/ Picasso" (1963) is very emblematic in this respect: it takes up a painting that Lichtenstein had painted a year before, and which was itself a reprise of a Picasso painting. This painting belongs to the first series of Jacquet's camouflages, in which the treatment of the image is based on that of military camouflage, but with complex cutting processes. To this is added the choice of bright colours, thus contributing to a greater dissimulation of the subject. Jacquet took the irony of the misappropriation process even further with the revival of Lichtenstein's Hot Dog (1963), lot 26, which was used in the same year for the unique "Saucisses-cocktail" evening at the Breteau gallery in June 1963. The artist had invited the public to take a "souvenir painting of Lichtenstein's camouflage", following dotted lines corresponding to fragments of canvas sold for ten francs each. These works are very representative of Alain Jacquet's art.
Alain Jacquet was a pioneer in the use of new media and technologies, as he explained in an interview with Sylvie Couderc in 1998: "When I made the thermoformed plastic boxes entitled 'Exposition' at Iolas in 1964, I intended to observe the progressive enlargement of the dots on a thermoformed surface; which will inevitably enlarge and deform the dot. With "LaSource" and other pieces I call "Frog's Thighs", I wanted to test the dot on inflatable surfaces. For "Olympia", the support was a vinyl sheet. I used transparent Plexiglas to create space between the different colour ranges, red, yellow, blue. Depending on the space you occupy, this type of piece offers different visions1. »
Alain Jacquet (1939-2008) Untitled, 1966
Estimate : 6000 / 9000 €
1Alain Jacquet. Extract from the interview with Sylvie Couderc -Catalogue of the Alain Jacquet exhibition at the Musée d'Amiens,1998.
