"In the words of his own will, Jacquet will vanish in a puff of smoke, returning as a dot."
Alain Jacquet is one of the best-known exponents of Nouvelle Figuration. From the start of his career, he painted a series of canvases inspired by the colors and shapes of backgammon. His works have the ambiguous character of being at once signed and painted, enduring as both a signature and a visual artifact. The artist signs his canvases “Jacquet” and covers them with all the letters, homonyms, paronomasia, codes, anagrams and hypograms that illustrative criticism invokes in its quest for a direct link between conceptual content and the signifiers of personal identity. Influenced by pop art, the artist blends popular and familiar images with famous ones of classical art, ever-obsessed with the ambiguous threshold of images, with their ability to embody both an abstract form and a recognizable figure.