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Bernar Venet
Between chaos and order
A concert based on the sound of Concorde airplane motors, a film
merely composed of industrial images, photos of asphalt, a pile of
coal, a ballet, paintings made with tar, reliefs in wood… The French
artist Bernar Venet has always sought out the boundaries of art. In
his quest for something ‘never done before’ and ‘different’ he has
experimented with various media.
Nonetheless, he is mainly known for his exploration with lines –
straight, arched, broken or with an indefinable shape – in drawings
and especially in monumental steel sculptures and installations.
Bernar Venet was born in 1941 (as Bernard Venet: he later
consciously removed the ‘d’ from his name) to a working-class family
in Château-Arnoux Saint-Auban in the Alps. He started drawing and
painting at a young age. At 11 he became conscious that art existed
when his mother took him to the local bookstore for paint and he saw
a book about Renoir in the display window.
He suddenly realised that he didn’t’ necessarily have to follow in
the footsteps of the rest of his family and that he could become an
artist.
After secondary school Venet went to Nice. He studied at the
municipal art academy Villa Thiole for two years then started
working as a set designer at the opera. During his subsequent
military service he was given use of an attic, where he concentrated
on making monochrome paintings with tar – a method that he continued
to explore once back in Nice. He photographed too: his photos showed
details of asphalt and gravel as well as piles of coal. This
inspired him to make the sculpture Tas de charbon in 1963. At the
end of the same year, Venet made ‘paintings’ from cardboard:
assemblages that he painted with a paint pistol. He dreamt that the
owners of what he called Peintures industrielles would apply a
different colour at any given time and change his work.
His work was greeted with little response in French artistic circles.
Despite this, Venet became friends with other artists such as César,
Hains, Villeglé and particularly Arman. Paris was under the spell of
Nouveau Réalisme, in which everyday objects are taken in hand so
that viewers perceive reality differently.
Venet’s abstract work fell by the wayside. At the insistence of
Arman, Venet moved to New York in 1966.
In the Whitney Museum he discovered the minimalists; he was struck
by the simplicity of their work and their motto ‘less is more’. He
stopped making his cardboard assemblages almost immediately. He came
into contact with artists like Carl André and Donald Judd, created
the ballet Graduation and made sculptures in the shape of tubes.
Soon afterwards he turned his back on sculpture and his art became
conceptual.
He embodied his ideas in mathematical diagrams but also relied on
astrology, nuclear physics and meteorology. He set up an academic
programme and in 1970 he stopped finished, in his opinion, and he
didn’t imagine ever making works of art again. Several years of
teaching and contemplation followed.
At the end of the 1970s, Venet picked up his brushes and his
exploration of the line began. No one was allowed to see the results
until one of the commissioners of Documenta VI viewed his work: his
paintings of arches and angles were exhibited in Kassel for the
first time.
Soon afterwards Venet abandoned canvasses and applied curved, broken
and straight lines directly on the wall in the form of wooden
reliefs that he treated with graphite. It was his first step in the
direction of three-dimensional work. In his desire to try new things,
he started to make Indeterminate Lines in addition to his
mathematically inspired arches and angles. The spiralling versions,
with a certain density, finally made him realise that he could also
execute his lines as sculptures – the impressive steel sculptures
that Venet is still making.
At the same time Indeterminate Lines brought a notion of chaos to
Venet’s oeuvre, which was otherwise so systematically calculated; a
notion that he introduced for the first time in 1963 with his Tas de
charbon.
Contrary to the paintings in tar, the coal piles have no
predetermined system; they are piled up in a disorderly fashion,
their shape developed spontaneously. That’s exactly how the
Indeterminate Lines get their shape even though Venet calculates the
angles and arches mathematically, as their titles lead us to suspect
(Two Arcs of 101.5º (1987), a sculpture consisting of two arches
that cover 101.5º of a circle; 215.5º Arc x 21 (2005), a sculpture
of 21 arches of 215.5º; Acute Angle of 19.5º (1986), a sculpture
with two legs that make a 19.5º angle, etc). In Random Combinations
of Indeterminate Lines – installations of criss-crossed
steel rods that are bent into all kinds of twisting shapes – Venet
drives chaos to a fever pitch. The spiral-shaped Indeterminate Lines
portray a certain order in all their beauty, but that has completely
disappeared in these installations. From sculpture to sculpture,
Venet has been balancing between order and chaos for years.
Anne-Marie Poels
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