Le déjeuner sur l'herbe

From 1967 onwards, dots became the generating entity of Jacquet’s work. He selected Édouard Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a masterpiece of pictorial modernity, as the subject of his first “mechanical” painting, reconstructing it will.

In the foreground, two men in modern dress, including the critic Pierre Restany (editor of the Manifeste du Nouveau Réalisme), surround Jeannine de Goldschmidt (director of gallery J), who is naked; on the other side of a lake is a hard-to-identify female figure who gazes at the scene. The screen printing reproduction of the photographic image has dilated the frame to such an extent that it reveals its constituent dots, introducing an element of colour instability.

This Déjeuner sur l’herbe is of central importance in Jacquet’s oeuvre, a pivotal work in his artistic output. Like optical art, the painting incorporâtes the accommodation of the viewer in the perception of shapes; at the same time, the chosen technique means that the image is infinitely multipliable, raising questions about the reproducibility of works and the signature, and questioning the very status of the painting

This work was first presented by the Pinault Collection in the exhibition « Forever Sixties » at the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes (2023).