Décollage

Decollage is a technique and practice that is the opposite of collage: instead of pasting elements on, the artist tears, rips, or removes layers of already existing material, most often posters and billboards, exposing lower strata and accidental rents. The term is associated above all with the Nouveau Realisme movement in France of the late 1950s and 1960s. The affichiste artists Jacques Villegle, Raymond Hains, Francois Dufrene, and Mimmo Rotella stripped tattered, torn advertising posters from city walls and presented them as finished works, in which chance rips, overlappings, and traces of time became an aesthetic statement about the modern urban environment and consumerism. Decollage turned the anonymous street surface into a kind of palimpsest of the city's collective memory. This strategy of the found and partly destroyed image echoes the idea of the ready-made and influenced later practices of appropriation, street art, and conceptual art.