"Dieu & Cie", a monograph devoted to François Dallegret published by Éditions de la Villette
© Éditions de la Villette
This monograph – the first in French – traces the work of François Dalleret (b. Morocco, 1937) over five decades, a prolific and unclassifiable creator at the crossroads of the visual arts, performance art, radical architecture, graphic and industrial design.
Dieu & Cie
François Dallegret. Art Fiction / Art Friction
Alessandra Ponte, Laurent Stalder, Thomas Weaver (dir.)
With an afterword by Liliana Albertazzi
Publication date: September 2025
French and expanded version of : GOD & CO. François Dallegret. Beyond the Bubble (London, Architectural Association, 2011)
Trained in architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, François Dallegret soon developed a passion for automotive design, technology, art and the media. From Paris to New York and then to Montreal, his career took in a variety of creative fields, where he forged fruitful relationships with the likes of Paco Rabanne, Iris Clert, Reyner Banham, Harry Shunk and János Kender. Both serious and ironic, his drawings borrow from the most rigorous graphic codes of architectural representation, the better to hijack them and put them at the service of a liberation of both space and the body, while offering a caustic critique of contemporary modes of living. In his studio GOD & CO – a contraction of “Go Dallegret” and a translation of “Dieu & Cie”, the name of a honey soap he turns into a ready-made – he invents all kinds of objects, machines and environments in which technology is pushed to its most cybernetic extremes to equip the contemporary hedonist.
But this alternative universe – which he calls Art Fiction – is not just fictional. Through commissions for public spaces, commercial and recreational facilities, François Dallegret’s work has never ceased to infuse our concrete reality, as much to entertain as to subvert it.
For further information, see his website.
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