"Tearing is, to me, a primal action, a guerrilla war of images and signs. With an angry gesture, the anonymous passer-by diverts the message and opens a new space of freedom. For me, the torn posters brought together the art of life and heralded the end of transposition painting."
The French painter and visual artist, Jacques Villegle, a founding member of the New Realists, is considered the leader of poster artists. By quoting these lines from Baudelaire in Urbi et Orbi, a book that retraces and theorizes his journey, Jacques Villeglé tends to give the artist the status of the viewer of images of the world, which he appropriates and metamorphoses in his way. Jacques Villegle is a flâneur, who even during his walks in the streets of the city, picks up on public panels the remains of torn posters that interest him from an aesthetic point of view. His approach is not to add a composition or color to the mounted poster, but to discover in the superposition of the layers of torn paper, the beauty of a shape, a color, a thickness of tears, that of a stain made by an anonymous hand, of graffiti, sometimes of writing, to reveal the wild and spontaneous aspect in itself of the civilized and urban life, rich in its savagery, of figures of beauties pristine and unique.