ALAIN JACQUET & JAMES ROSENQUIST
Perrotin New York is pleased to present Alain Jacquet & James Rosenquist. This sweeping exhibition elucidates the expressive work of Jacquet and Rosenquist.
October 29 – December 21, 2024
Alain Jacquet and James Rosenquist: two artists forever labeled as Pop artists but whose work (like that of most good artists) transcends labels. Born in the 1930s and coming onto the art scene in the 1960s, they could not help but be marked by social transformations of the postwar era, what the French later came to call les trente glorieuses: a period of economic expansion and prosperity but also of profound anxiety, the causes of which included the cold war and attendant fears of nuclear disaster. It was also the time when humans first ventured into space— science fiction fables seemed to be coming true—and this was another effort fueled by military competition between the Soviet Union and the United States; again, mixing optimism and unease.
Rosenquist, though he drew constantly on the technical image world as a source for motifs, expressed indifference to the internet and eschewed mechanical means of production, maintaining his faith in the human hand and its wondrous abilities as shown by the old masters in works, as he said, “made with minerals mixed in oil schmeared on cloth with hair from the back of a pig’s ear.” His early experience as a painter of billboards had taught him how traditional tools used in a new context and at a different scale afforded entirely new effects.
Among the images to which Jacquet was drawn was the first photograph of the Earth taken from the moon in 1969, which he used as a source repeatedly in the 1970s and 1980s. Just as he had decomposed images into dots that could expand in scale, he realized that the earth seen from space was itself nothing more than another dot made of smaller dots, which can in turn form images within the image. Then, as an early adopter of the computer, he began using it to transform images of the Earth and other planets into comical sausage and donut forms, even using these to create cosmic pastiches of famous artworks from the past, as in Bonjour Monsieur Courbet (Version rouge négatif) (1999).
Rosenquist once remarked that “their parallel existences on earth and in space” might threaten to make astronauts go mad, but like Jacquet, he knew we all share that parallel existence, and looked to art for sanity.