Bernar Venet
© Philipp Hugues Bonan
«The indefinite line conveys nothing other than its image; it only indicates its existence as a line.»
© Philipp Hugues Bonan
French artist born in 1941 in Château-Arnoux Saint Auban in the Haute Provence Alps. Beginning his career in 1961 by applying a layer of tar to his canvases and exhibiting a sculpture composed of a simple pile of charcoal, Bernar Venet’s avant-garde work was quickly encouraged by the leaders of the French art scene: Arman, César, Jacques Villeglé…
Already an adept of the paintbrush at the age of 10, he participated in the Péchiney painting salon at the age of 11. Persuaded that his existence would be artistic or not, Bernar Vent decided to persevere when the Nice School of Fine Arts refused to admit him. Finally enrolled in another institution, he gradually trained in the art of oil painting.
Although he made his artistic debut in the 1950s as an assistant decorator at the Nice Opera, the plastic artist asserted his aesthetic personality once he settled in the United States. A keen student of exact sciences and mathematics, he developed a reflection on art based on abstraction. Disorder and chance thus became his preferred themes, as evidenced by the most explicit example, ‘Indeterminate Lines’, an installation in steel that made him world-renowned. Author of multiple monosemias (or one-way works of art), Bernar Venet appropriates various visual communication media.
Taking over New York in 1966, he discovered minimal art and continued his work with the experience of tube plans, reproducing scientific images only for their sense and the evocation of their formula. The neutral image is freed from the intervention of the artist and the subjectivity of his gaze. He exhibits alongside proponents of minimal and conceptual art: Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Dan Flavin… in the Dwan and Paula Cooper galleries… He then develops a four-year program that deals with the various branches of science and which he plans to end his artistic career. In the mid-1970s, he takes a break from his artistic work, during which he becomes a professor at the Sorbonne. The work he finally resumed starting in 1976 continues his commitment to mathematical formulas and takes a formalistic turn, both in paintings and sculptures. Since chance is mathematical, he develops series of sculptures titled «indeterminable lines» following the path of the hand without any particular aesthetic search, without a predefined pattern. Following these, he develops sculptures composed of arcs that place the degrees that both define and compose them in space.
Deployed in corten steel, Bernar Venet’s «arcs» develop a materiality and a sense of their environment. The lines through their variations: Arcs, Slanted Arcs, Vertical Arcs, collapses… form Venet’s vocabulary, which through them addresses the issues of sculpture: relationships to the body, to balance, to the surrounding space…
But the insatiable creator returns to the scene in 1999 with his landmark sculpture ‘4 Arcs of 235.5°’, created on the occasion of the G8 summit in Cologne. Artist, sculptor, draftsman, photographer and choreographer, the artist appears as a free spirit capable of designing the furniture and stained glass windows of a chapel as well as undertaking mural painting. A creative force that has been at work for about fifty years.
