Alain Jacquet Pop Artist, But not Only
The Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin now represents the estate of Alain Jacquet (1939-2008), organising a large-scale exhibition in its two spaces in the Marais, from April 20th to June 5th, 2021. This is an opportunity to dive back into a major oeuvre, one of the most fascinating of the 20th century.
As we remember Serge Gainsbourg, who died exactly thirty years ago, a photograph of a television set shows the singer with Alain Jacquet. Both of them took part in the variety show ‘4 temps’ in 1969. Jacquet had made the set, an enlarged version of his Vénus au miroir [Venus at her Mirror] after Velazquez. This shot is strange. Two dandies face each other and seem somewhat indifferent to each other. I have often wondered what the author of the song Comic Strip, who often claimed to have abandoned fine art in favour of music, might have thought of this encounter. In any case, the composition of this image curiously evokes an earlier work by Jacquet, La Cène [The Last Supper] (1964), a camouflage isolating a detail of the famous fresco by da Vinci in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. The void that unfolds between Jacquet and Gainsbourg is in every way similar to the abyssal gap between Jesus and Saint John.
But before that, Jacquet began his career by painting abstract pictures in the footsteps of the École de Paris, then he reinterpreted in this pictorial mode an old allegorical engraving, L’Union de la France et de l’Autriche [The Union of France and Austria] (in the Images d’Épinal [Épinal Prints] series). Around 1962-63 he began the Camouflages, in which a grid (initially vegetal) flattens, abolishes volume and confers a relative invisibility. Painted in oil on canvas, the Camouflages generally mix two images that “transpire” into each other. In this way, he “recaptures” some masterpieces, such as Michelangelo’s Adam and Eve in the Sistine Chapel, Jasper Johns’ Flags, and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, of which he made three versions camouflaged as a petrol pump. His relationship to pop art is ambivalent. He is undoubtedly a pop artist, but he doesn’t shy away from criticism. He was already a regular visitor to New York but didn’t yet live there. He reacted very quickly to the works of Lichtenstein in particular, but he wasn’t a follower, and was sometimes ahead of the Americans.The dot pattern may have appeared for the first time in Camouflage Uccello (1963), and Warhol didn’t come to camouflage until the 1980s.
TROU DU CRU
I think it was Arman who evoked Jacquet exclaiming at a New York opening: “You know what the problem is with Walt Disney characters? It’s that they don’t have arseholes.” The artist was thus emphasising their nature as creatures imagined by a man and therefore as gods, as unreal as those appearing in old paintings, since neither Mickey nor Donald go to the loo, and until proven otherwise, there were no toilets on Olympus. In 1963 he made the Walt Disney Camouflages by painting a frame onto plaster figures. This went as far as the cheese eaten at his table, the Trou du cru, a derivative of the Burgundian Époisses. In his house in the Sologne region, a grain silo transformed into a Spartan holiday home, theTurkish toilet was transformed into a shower as if by magic (these toilets can be found in the large cross, Rota, which he exhibited at Pierre and Marianne Nahon’s Beaubourg gallery in 1990). And the planets deformed into a ring or doughnut obviously evoke anuses. Jacquet was funny, very deadpan. An English humour, elegant but tinged with a very French sauciness. For the catalogue of his exhibition at the Galerie de France in 1981, he asked Alain Robbe-Grillet for a text. The writer cavalierly declined, saying: “Go see Butor [Michel], he’ll wipe it off for you very well.” So Jacquet had his text and printed this simple sentence on the back cover. In this way he mocked the writer.
After the Camouflages came the trampled works and what Pierre Restany called Mec Art (for Mechanical art). Jacquet multiplied various silk-screen frames. From this period, around 1964, comes Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, and all the details that were taken from it, on canvas or Plexiglas. This painting, or rather these paintings, re-enact Manet’s work with friends by a swimming pool in the Paris region, itself inspired by an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, which copied a lost composition by Raphael, which reinterpreted the river gods of Antiquity. Jacquet in fact (almost) always relied on pre-existing images. He anticipated the remakes of the 1990s. This is partly why he is pop, in the musical sense of the word, as he produced many cover versions. In the traced works, we come across The Abduction of Europa, Bathers after Thomas Eakins or Gaby d’Estrées in the bath, but also a Plage des Antilles [Antillian Beach], a scale weighing apples or a simple sphere made up of dots and painted on a wall, to be looked at from the other side of Lake Geneva (12m in diameter no less!).
TRUTH COMING OUT OF THE WELL
Jacquet took a more abstract and conceptual turn at the end of the 1960s, with the patterns of the weaves of burlap sacks and parquet floors, which led to the electric wires coming out of the wall at the Yvon Lambert gallery in 1969. That same year he took part in the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form. Braille (for which he imagines a system of equivalence with the I Ching) and topological figures (Möbius rings and Klein bottles) occupied him for more than ten years, mainly on a sculptural level, and he returned to oil painting from 1978 with Visions de la Terre [Visions of the Earth]. From a photograph of our planet released by NASA, Jacquet discerned all sorts of details in the same way that Da Vinci saw battles in the stains on a wall: a bird, a clown’s head, a bloody anamorphic bullfight, a Baconian pope, a woman’s vagina, right up to this large trapezoidal painting that takes up the very 19th century subject of La Vérité Sortant du Puits [Truth Coming Out of the Well] (1983), but in a much more sexual way, and which constitutes a sort of manifesto. During the 1980s the computer made new approaches to the image possible, so that he swapped canvas and brushes for mouse and inkjet printer. The pixel succeeded the silkscreen dot. The artist began to deform the image of the Earth into toroids and carpets.Then, as technology evolved further, he invited other planets from the solar system and took up Matisse’s Dance in a cosmic mode. His version of the amorous subject of Mars and Venus, substituting the planets named in their honour for the gods, is most poetic. These works are the ultimate form of land art.
I apologise for reducing an immense oeuvre to a few lines. However, there is still much to be unearthed. For example, the Amazonas project (on which he began work in 1971) never came to fruition. It was based on a project by Boullée, the 18th century architect, and was intended to evoke, with the help of a crystal ball and a large structure, the confluence of the Rio Solimões and Rio Negro in Brazil, where clear and muddy waters don’t mix for several kilometres. For a long time I thought this work was related to the Manifeste du Rio Negro written by Pierre Restany in 1978, but it predates the text.
CONCEPTUAL AND FORMAL
Jacquet was a Duchampian, but also a creator of forms. Conceptual and formal. Lacanian too. It is rare for an artist to be equally relevant in both of these categories. To have these two hats, as they say, is in my opinion the mark of great art.
One of my first press trips, indeed the very first, took me to the Musée de Picardie in Amiens in March 1998 for a retrospective of Jacquet’s work (curator: Sylvie Couderc).The visit to this exhibition was undoubtedly decisive in my life. On this occasion I met a few legends, such as Pierre Restany and Marcelin Pleynet, but it was Catherine Millet who introduced me to the artist. I was already familiar with the remarkable monograph, published by artpress, that Duncan Smith devoted to him. But the Amiens exhibition allowed me to enter the work through some of the themes that structure it, for example by comparing the word dog/god written in Braille with egg cartons (1980) to the Camouflage Jasper Johns, La Voix de son Maître [Jasper Johns Camouflage, His Master’s Voice], where the dog of the Pathé Marconi brand appears (1963), or Hot Dog, a large painting from 1981 featuring a poodle stirred by the vision of a half-buried skull. (Not to mention the Hot Dog Lichtenstein cut up in 1963 at the Galerie Breteau into multiple fragments). The Amiens exhibition abolished chronology. Time doesn’t exist, Jacquet understood this. I know of few works that are so coherent and seem to obey such implacable logic. A small book published by the Gallerie Givaudan in 1978, Helen’s Boomerang, gives a glimpse of this logic because it juxtaposes Jacquet’s works and inspirations, such as Giorgione’s Pastoral Concert or road signs. This is one of the best artist’s books ever. One quickly integrates the play of visual and conceptual equivalences in the work. The dot is a key, but not the only one. During the last years of his life Jacquet produced very few works, but he did make an effort to show his earlier works, this time in chronological sections (the camouflages, the screened works, the parquet floors, etc.), probably because the public had difficulty grasping the general project of linking them together. I am going to write something that will sound pompous, but I have sincerely thought it for over twenty years: Alain Jacquet is one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. I don’t know how many art galleries the artist sold out in his lifetime, but even after his death, he’s been on the move. In recent years alone, Georges-Philippe and Nathalie Vallois, Laurent Strouk, and now Emmanuel Perrotin. Many of us have deplored the fact that his work hasn’t been recognised for its true value. I am not in any way minimising the efforts previously made, they were necessary, but I hope that the time has finally come.
Alain Jacquet
Né en / born in 1939 à / in Neuilly-sur-Seine Mort en / dead in 2008 à / in New York
Expositions importantes / Important exhibitions: 2021 Galerie Perrotin, Paris
2019 Galerie Laurent Strouk, Paris
2018 Galerie Sabine Wachters, Knokke-le-Zoute 2015 Galerie G.-P. & N. Vallois, Paris
2005 Mamac, Nice
2002 Couvent des Cordeliers, Châteauroux 1998 Musée de Picardie, Amiens
1996 Galerie Templon, Paris
1993 Centre Pompidou, Paris
1990 Biennale de São Paulo (pavillon français) 1989 Galerie Beaubourg, M. et P. Nahon, Paris 1978 ARC, Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris 1964 Alexander Iolas Gallery, New York
1961 Galerie Breteau, Paris