Alain Jacquet
Alain Jacquet (1939-2008), born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, lived and worked in Paris and New York. A key figure of French Pop Art and Mec’Art (Mechanical Art), he developed a distinctive practice based on the mechanical reproduction and transformation of images. Drawing on advertising, popular culture and art history, Jacquet appropriated familiar imagery and reworked it through silkscreen and enlarged photographic halftone processes, bringing the mechanisms of mass reproduction into the artwork itself.
Jacquet is particularly known for his Camouflages, in which masterpieces of art history and images from contemporary popular culture are superimposed or reinterpreted, and for his celebrated Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1964), a contemporary reworking of Édouard Manet’s painting. By enlarging the photographic halftone to the point where individual dots become visible, Jacquet created images that oscillate between figuration and abstraction. His work thus combines the visual language of Pop Art with a sustained investigation of reproduction, perception and the status of the original artwork.
Alain Jacquet Editions
Alain Jacquet
Baie Rouge (La Plage des Antilles)
1968
Silkscreen on Lana paper, with embossing, 56 x 75 cm. Edition of 100, signed and numbered.
This edition by Alain Jacquet transforms a coastal landscape into a striking composition of colour and concentric lines. A tranquil view of the sea and shoreline is overlaid with a dense blue grid that radiates from the sun, fragmenting the landscape into rhythmic bands and giving the image an almost hypnotic visual effect.
The work exemplifies Jacquet’s Mec’Art practice, in which photographic imagery is transformed through mechanical processes and the enlargement of the image grid. Rather than simply reproducing the landscape, Jacquet makes the structure of its reproduction visible, creating a tension between the recognizable image and an increasingly abstract pattern. The result is a landscape that appears to oscillate between photographic representation and pure graphic form.
EUR 3,000
Alain Jacquet
La Vierge et l’enfant
1966
Silkscreen on paper, 32 x 24 cm. Edition of 300, signed and numbered.
Alain Jacquet’s edition La Vierge et l’Enfant (1966) transforms a Renaissance image of the Virgin and Child into a striking composition of photographic dots and vivid colour. The central figures emerge from dense horizontal bands of black, green, yellow and red, with the underlying image becoming increasingly fragmented and difficult to distinguish. The strong contrast between the recognizable religious subject and the mechanical, almost abstract surface is characteristic of Jacquet’s engagement with the processes of photographic and mass-media reproduction.
EUR 2,000
