Bernar Venet The Paradox of Coherence 6-37 Summary Art Selection 38-97 Early Wall Reliefs 39-45 Recent Wall Reliefs: GRIBS 46-63 Paintings: Saturations and Shaped Canvases 64-97 Curriculum Vitae 98-110 Acknowledgements 111 3 Portrait of Bernar Venet, 2011 4 5 Artistic production can only result from curious, open thought. It functions as a system whose richness consists of The Paradox of Coherence accepting, at one and the same time, the principles of harmony and conflict. It is the competition between those two elements or givens that creates a whole; and thus the principle of anti-organization becomes a factor in the development, the indispensable dynamism of the creative process. Bernar Venet, 1976 1 Bernar Venet has earned world fame as a sculptor of monumental art, but he began as a painter. Today he makes both paintings and sculptures which have their deep roots in an analytic program he began as a very young artist determined to escape the existing models and to formulate a radical art based on geometric theorems and the graphic imagery of mathematical formulas. As an inquisitive teenager he frequented the record store of the legen- dary “Ben”, the Fluxus artist Ben Vautier who drove around in a bus covered with anti art graffiti slogans and was a reference point for the international avant-garde. Through Ben, the precocious Venet met the Fluxus artists George Maciunas, Robert Filliou and George Brecht whose work he appreciated but found too close to Dada. Ben also introduced him to the group of avant-garde artists like Arman, César, Yves Klein and the German “Zero” group who were challenging the high modernist ab- straction practiced in Paris. Although the assemblage artists Pierre Restany promoted as the Nouveaux réalistes became his friends, Venet’s natural inclination was to align himself with the more austere and intellectual mono- chrome artists, rather than with the assemblage aesthetic of the Nouveaux réalistes. Ben remembered Venet as a young soldier already experimenting with radical art. (Venet was drafted in 1961, sent to Tarascon and later, as the war was winding down, to Algeria). During a furlough from the army he visited Ben, announcing he was the fastest painter in the world. “I take five sheets of paper, lay them down side by side on the floor, take a bottle of ink and spatter all five in a tenth of a second with a single sweep of my arm. That makes two one hundredths of a second for each one. Nobody’s faster than I am!” 2. The spontaneous execution of these paintings could be considered a performance and indeed Venet became increasingly interested in actions documented by photography. In 1961 he started working with trash, poor mate- rials that anticipated arte povera, rescued from garbage cans. The “trash” paintings, which recorded not an image but a process, were made by spilling paint on the cardboard panels allowing gravity to determine the direction and form of the image. 1 Bernar Venet remarks, “Published for the first time in the catalogue of my exhibition at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art during the fall of 1976, this text is a virtual manifesto, announcing my return to artistic activity and the necessity of being in a permanent and rigorous state of questioning.” Lawrence Alloway and Thierry Kuntzel. Bernar Venet, La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California, USA, 1976. 2 Ben tells this anecdote in the 1977 catalogue on the Ecole de Nice by Ben Vautier, Maurice Eschapasse, Nathalie Brunet, Musée national d’art moderne, CNAC Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, 1977. 7 Bernar Venet in his studio on rue Parolière, Scraps [Déchets] 1961 Représentation graphique Equations 1966-7 Nice, 1965 Industrial paint on cardboard de la fonction y = -x²/4 1966 Acrylic on canvas Exhibition: Kunsthalle Mücsarnok, Budapest, Hungary, 2012 Acrylic on canvas Exhibition: Kunsthalle Mücsarnok, Budapest, Hungary, 2012 146 x 121 cm Collection: Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France The Paradox of Coherence Art Selection Curriculum Vitae Acknowledgements A committed experimenter, Venet had already rejected the idea that art transformed matter or that it depended on cowboy suggested freedom and adventure. Eventually he would find both in his own nonconformity. But first he the relationship of shapes to one another. Once again emphasizing process over image, in 1963, in the first work would need to reconcile the two opposing elements of his personality: intellectual introspection and physical ac- he made as a professional artist, Venet claimed as a sculpture a heap of charcoal whose form changed every time tion often expressed in a love of speed and spontaneity fighting against the periods of concentration and analysis it was dumped on the floor and exhibited. Both the specificity as well as the informal unpremeditated organization during which his premises are worked out. of the material predict the deconstructed elements of arte povera as well as post-minimalist anti-form. Recent investigations have found that the most highly creative and original artists suffer from various childhood ill- The 1963 Heap of Coal was intentionally inexpressive. In the tar paintings of the early Sixties, Venet dispensed nesses and traumas that take them away from normal physical activities and provoke episodes of depression dur- with color and texture. He used tar as a medium because it was free and available but also to avoid oil paint, ing which mental activity supplants the normal physical outlets of children and adolescents 4. Bernar Venet was no which is expressive of the hand of the artist. He termed the built up layers of tar painted on cardboard “industrial exception. As a child he suffered from debilitating asthma attacks that kept him out of school and indoors with time paintings” because of their standardized surfaces, which nevertheless do not look mechanical, geometric or pro- to think, read and reflect. Like Jasper Johns he is an auto-didact with no university education who attended a small grammatic. Thus even at the outset of his career, paradox and a sense of contradiction characterizes Venet’s art. art school only briefly. What he learned he taught himself in his quest for self-education motivated by a voracious intellectual curiosity. This effacement of his own hand is typical of all of Venet’s works from the beginning until the present. It was a choice made not because he lacked technical facility but rather to remove himself from his work. The Constructiv- Before he could move forward, however, Venet had to resolve an existential crisis that caused him to think of the art ists were the first to wish to create impersonal art that effaced the personality and emotions of the artists in favor of the past as a prison from which he had to be freed. In 1959 he produced a series of small paintings that he ex- of universality and generalization. Yet we know a lot about the lives of these Russian and Eastern European artists hibited in Saint-Auban before leaving for the army. In Life is a Furlough from Death, 1959 a tiny figure inspired by the who dedicated themselves to geometry and strict theories that inspired Mondrian and later non-objective artists. graphic symbols of Paul Klee enclosed in a square within a receding square looks as lost as a character in a Beckett But none managed to so completely efface their own personalities as totally as Bernar Venet, who thoroughly play. The work was painted in Nice while Venet was working as stage designer at the opera. At the time he was fas- erased his feelings and private life from his work to the extent that critics and historians have been turned into cinated by the mystery of symbols painted works titled Tomb, Life, Identity and Christ on the Cross… Given his future archeologists in order to reconstruct his evolution as an artist. development one can imagine that this period of late adolescence coincided with an existential crisis of faith. He had symbolically painted himself into a corner, Sartre’s Huit clos from which he had to find an exit in order to survive. PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST THE SEARCH FOR ZERO DEGREE ART Creation is first and foremost a historic fact. This does not mean it should be understood as a simple mechanical relationship between cause and effect, for artistic creation is a function of social milieu, personal biography, the I reject all personal emotion translated onto canvas; we live in an age where industry has taken over… I think eve- subjective life of the artist, technical and economic resources, and many other things. rything can be reduced to graphs, which have no place for spirit and emotion. Development can only come about Bernar Venet, 1975 3 through logic: this is why I have taken my art in the direction of logic, which relies a great deal on discipline. Bernar Venet, 1967 5 Bernar Venet was born during World War II in Saint-Auban, a provincial manufacturing town in the northern alpine region of Provence. He was a very precocious child who copied Rembrandt drawings with such obvious artistic In his influential essay The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes continued his description of what he termed the talent that he was invited to exhibit his first oil paintings in the Salon de Peinture de Péchiney in Paris when he was “degree zero of literature”. This degree zero would mean a new beginning of a neutral art of surface free of emotional eleven years old. The youngest of four boys, Bernar was drawn not to science like his chemist father, who died content and distanced from its creator.