Jacques Villeglé and the photographer Raymond Hains, his friend, introduced two new artistic terms in the 1960s: ‘décollagiste’ and ‘affichiste’. As a starting point for their work, they used ‘affiches déchirées’: fragments of posters that they glued one on top of the other. The artists obtained these pieces by soaking, ripping or cutting posters away from public advertising hoardings. From these scraps they created new images. In his early works, Villeglé experimented with typography in a dark colour palette. Later, he incorporated cut-outs with bright colours and figurative details, to which he applied touches of paint. At times his work is nimble and satirical; at others it is sharp and critical.
