Camouflage Jasper Johns, La Voix de son Maître

Alain Jacquet worked with the artistic experiments of the 1960s in his Camouflages, canvases on which he overlaid disparate images. He deftly combined emblematic motifs from art history, from the Renaissance to Pop, with elements from contemporary popular culture. The images meld and melt into one another, thereby creating new meanings through the subtle inter-penetration of colours and forms.

In Camouflage Jasper Johns, La Voix de Son Maître (1963), Jacquet revisits the work Three Flags (1958) by his contemporary Jasper Johns, who, in the Pop Art movement, accentuated the stereotypical, ubiquitous nature of the star-spangled banner as a representative motif of American civilisation. To this trio of outwardly projecting American flags, Jacquet added the logo of the record label Pathé-Marconi, “His Master’s Voice”, which depicts a dog entranced by a gramophone.

Jacquet played with the ambiguous connotations of the images that he chose to “telescope”, to use Guy Scarpetta's expression. He duplicated the initial critique in Johns’ work, and the appropriation of the slogan thus becomes an ironic denunciation of American hegemony, even in the art world. Although Jacquet was very much influenced by American Pop Art, he adopted a more complex approach, developing a rich system of quotations and a sophisticated colour scheme.

Cette œuvre a été montrée pour la première fois par Pinault Collection en 2023 au Couvent des Jacobins à Rennes, à l’occasion de l’exposition « Forever Sixties ».