Between Paris and New York: Alain Jacquet, the French Pop icon
(French, 1939-2008)
Alain Jacquet was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1939. After he studied drama at the University of Grenoble, he transferred to the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1959, where he delved into architecture for two years, and eventually came to painting, entirely self-taught.
In the early 1960s, Alain Jacquet became friends with the Nouveaux Réalistes, in particular artists Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely, and art critic Pierre Restany, who provided him with critical and theoretical support throughout his career. In 1963, he introduced his Camouflage series, three-dimensional sculptures painted in camo-like colorful combinations. He then employed the same principle for his Camouflage paintings, in which he layered masterpieces of art history, from Michelangelo to Matisse, Botticelli or Bronzino, with iconic forms from consumer society and trivial elements of popular culture. Through the astute overlapping of images, the paintings delivered unexpected and witty assimilations, playing on the collision of several registers of meaning.
Around the mid-1960s, Jacquet started experimenting with image reproduction, multiplication and distortion and took part in the artistic group “Mec’Art” (Mechanical Art). Coined by Pierre Restany, the term designated art produced without manual intervention, and gathered artists such as Gianni Bertini, Mimmo Rotella, Pol Bury and Nikos Kessanlis. Jacquet experimented with the endless possibilities offered by the technical tools at his disposal, transforming and distorting images by playing directly with the mesh of dots inherent in the screen printing process. By enlarging the images so much so that the initial visual disappeared and only single color dots became visible, Jacquet would challenge the notion of the image as a singular entity.
The mid-1960s corresponded to Jacquet’s period of creative effervescence, and his works closely aligned with American and English Pop Art. When he presented his works at the Robert Fraser Gallery in London in 1963, he met Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake, Derek Boshier and Allan Jones, the grandmasters of English Pop Art. The following year, Jacquet moved to the Chelsea Hotel in New York for a few months. During that time, he exhibited a retrospective of his Camouflages at Alexander Iolas Gallery, where he met the luminaries of US Pop Art: Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, as well as their dealer Leo Castelli.
At the end of the 1960s, Jacquet, who began working with gallery owner Daniel Varenne, lived between New York and Paris, and exhibited in many museums and galleries around the world. In 1967, he represented France at the Biennale of São Paulo and had a solo show in 1968 at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago. He was the only French to be exhibited by Swiss curator and artist, Harald Szeemann, in his acclaimed exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle in Bern in 1969. In 1976, he represented the French Pavilion at the XXXVII Venice Biennale.
In the 1970s, Jacquet continued his exploration of decomposing images and in 1978, with the advent of computer technology, he discovered a new freedom which led to his Vision paintings. Clichés of the terrestrial globe engaged in metamorphoses in which planets at times became characters, and others, the artist projected his own interior visions and fantasies. Jacquet here reaffirmed his taste for provocation and visual innovation.
In 1989, Alain Jacquet moved back to Paris where he worked at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs on the program of new technologies for the Delegation of Visual Arts. In 1992, he married his second wife, the painter Sophie Matisse, great-granddaughter of Henri Matisse and granddaughter-in-law of Marcel Duchamp.
Jacquet continued to live and work between Paris and New York for the rest of his life, and died in New York in 2008.