For our second participation to The Armory Show the gallery has decided to focus on a French artist who was deeply connected to the American art scene, Alain Jacquet (1939-2008).
This exhibition project has been especially conceived for The Armory Show, in a narrow collaboration with Sophie Matisse and the Alain Jacquet Comity. Despite his death five years ago in New York City where he used to live mainly since 1964 this project will demonstrate how his approach still sounds very contemporary and that he continues to have a major influence on the current scene.
Alain Jacquet was a leader into using very large media and innovative materials with a particular precocity. At the very beginning of the 60’s he started to work on his famous Camouflages, confronting populars images and icons of museums before one of his masterpieces, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1964), by using silkscreen process which with he had introduced mechanical style. The traitement of the images, that Jacquet proceeds, makes him close at this time from Martial Raysse — for the French part — to Americain artists like Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein.
He shows firstly his work in New York at Alexander Iolas Gallery in 1964 and obtains immediately an international consideration. He took part to major exhibitions like Documenta IV and When attitudes become form.
During the following decades Alain Jacquet introduced new supports like vinyl or plexiglass and at the earlier of the 80’s, he began to use computer and produced very large pieces (former than Jeff Koons). He does not yet give up the traditional practice of painting to give fantasmatic visions of Earth, variations about our planet based upon a same photography made by NASA and the first spacemen.
It is this appetite of experience, renewing the stakes and the questions of his work, always interested in the phenomena of transformation, his almost scientific curiosity and his exceptional ease blows up that our project wants to let perceive through the selected works for the art fair.
The booth will gather a set of significant pieces of periods and the main themes of the artist, the photomechanical weft of the 60’s, until the landscapes of the Earth and the solar system and will demonstrate the consistency of this process which, for more than thirty years, developed compared to the pictures stemming from new technologies and from their incidence in the art.