Jacques Villeglé is a French artist and “affichiste,” best known for his torn collaged works made from posters and advertisements. Villeglé’s work is representative of an obscured sense of cultural reference and the deterioration of civilization, with his densely layered surfaces suggesting social and political critiques through their appropriated imagery. “In the 1930s, the poster was called the newspaper of the street,” he explained, “something that really reflected society. And what I think I realized at the time was that the posters, as an art form, were always going to evolve and so there would always be something new to explore.” Born in Quimper, France on March 27, 1926, it was during a stay in Saint-Malo in 1947 when he began pilfering material from the city's Atlantic-retaining wall for use in collage. Over time, he developed his distinctive process of layered advertising posters, offering a ripped and degraded conceptual survey of contemporary French culture that became an important influence to the Nouveau Realisme movement. Villeglé's work is aligned with the Ultra-Lettrist movement of the late 1950s, stemming from his contact with the Lettrist poet François Dufrêne in 1954 who would also introduce him to the prominent artists Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely.