GLANCE INTO THE PAST
Monsieur Venet, as your exhibition "Bernar Venet – 1961 … Looking Forward" runs until June 16th at the 2024 Biennale Arte in Venice, viewers are treated to a retrospective of your early 1960s works in the majestic Salone Sansoviniano. How does this illustrious venue influence the exhibition and impact of your works, especially juxtaposed with Renaissance masterpieces by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese?
It's always difficult to exhibit in a place that doesn‘t correspond to the typical “white cube” that we find in galleries and museums, and for me, to be surrounded by artists like Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Canaletto is a real challenge.
As I was limited by weight restrictions for my sculptures, and dimensions issues for my paintings, I immediately thought it would be interesting to play on the very strong – and seemingly provocative – contrast, by showing “brutal” works from the beginning of my career, with my Tar paintings, my Cardboard Reliefs, and particularly, the Pile of Coal.
GLIMPSE INTO THE FUTURE
There is always a kind of correspondence of the masterpieces from former centuries, as the contemporary art is not free of any reflections on what has been achieved so far, but again, I was interested in a sharp statement which made it clear that already in my very first steps into art, I was searching for something radically new. I believe that this is visible now in the presentation of my works there and that in a good sense the old masters, this amazing architecture, and my early conceptual works are challenging each other.
Starting your artistic career with basic materials such as tar, cardboard, and coal, what initially drew you to these materials, and how did they shape your artistic direction?
These works, that constitute the beginning of my artistic activity already highlight everything that follows, particularly, self-referentiality, the work that refers only to itself, as it developed in my conceptual period, and in the following works. My sculptures are only the demonstration of the creation process. In these early works, we can also see a direction towards sobriety, and the emphasis on the material. This experimental period, which marks my artistic beginnings, is essential for everything that has followed, although the sculptures – starting from 1976 onwards – seemed like a radical rupture. It is through them, that my work started to be accepted, but the starting years had a very essential value for my life and career.
PARK OF ART
The Venice exhibition focuses on your works from the early 60s, a smaller slice of the period covered by your 2021 retrospective in Berlin. Why do you specifically highlight these early works now?
These early works are less known than my sculptural work. In a very evident way, they are the direct origin of everything that followed. This is why it was important to me to show them in this exhibition which was going to have a large audience. There are as well these two other aspects, which gives the emphasis on my early work more resonance: First of all, it is this demanding historical space, loaded with an iconographic program and then, it is the 60th edition of the Biennale in Venice. This all together underlines the importance of art and art reception.
Comparing the industrial ambiance of Berlin's former Tempelhof Airport to the ornate Salone Sansoviniano, how did these contrasting settings affect your perception of your exhibitions?
Again, it is always a challenge to find ourselves confronted with a space that isn’t typical of the conventional gallery or museum walls, and we must find a way to adapt. More so, as was the case with Tempelhof, find a way in a place that is so physical, so charged, despite everything, to ensure that the work keeps a strong presence. And in a completely different environment, it was even more challenging in the Biblioteca Marciana. This is an atypical space for contemporary art, as the historical setting is still powerful today. Regular tourists don‘t even expect a contemporary art intervention and therefore it is important that everything keeps a balance and that my early works stands strongly enough with this ambiance.
Your journey from monochromatic board paintings to the famous steel arcs and Indeterminate Lines suggests a shift from two-dimensional surfaces to three-dimensional lines. Is this transition your artistic response to the perpetual debate in art between plane and line?
When we look at a book that shows my body of work, we discover that I have to constantly move forward. I have not a priority on materials or on shapes that I can explore. In total freedom, I make what becomes necessary for me to make: to go from tar-covered paintings, to cardboard, to then delve into my conceptual period where I made photographic blow-ups, to the canvas, the relief, and to sculpture … this is simply my incessant desire to question myself and what I’ve thought up until then. As you know, my sculptures vary as well by the time, but I also explored painting. First with wall paintings of which consisted only of monochromatic works, using mathematical formulas. I presented them for the first time at the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz in 2002. Many years later I created paintings on canvas, then changed them into shaped canvases and am now interested in the creation of paintings made from algorithms, more precisely generative art.
As a radical conceptual artist who has ventured into music composition, poetry, film, choreography, and stage design, do you find conceptual links between these disciplines? How does your approach to composing music differ from your visual art?
In 1967, I wrote a sort of manifesto where I criticized the very notion of “style”. I thought that a similar content could be expressed via various disciplines. In fact, I came up with what we can refer to as a “conceptual matrix” which allowed me to explore all the disciplines. The reasoning is the same: it’s the principle of equivalency. For instance, when in 1963, I would make black Tar paintings, a sculpture composed of coal, presenting a book with only black pages as the sole subject, introducing a sound composition of a wheelbarrow rolling on gravel, for its monotonous and repetitive qualities, taking photos of a road that was just covered with new tar… all of this had a common point, and through all these subject-matters, I made the same point.
With your longstanding fascination with numbers and their relationship to the world, you explore the boundaries between art, science, and mathematical logic. Can you take us on a journey into where mathematics integrates into your art?
People are often surprised when I tell them that I am far from being an expert in mathematics. I immediately use the example of how Cézanne, who painted trees, flowers, and plants, was not a botanist, and I could give many more examples, like Malevitch who did not study geometry but presented it in his paintings. In reality, the subjects that artists choose are selected based on new openings in the artistic realm. As far as I am concerned, using mathematical diagrams or scientific information as a subject simply meant exploring a completely new and unknown direction. One that meant going somewhere that was no longer figurative or abstract, like the mathematic language used to study maps, is meant to communicate with immense precision, and we now find ourselves, with my work, in a field that we call “monosemy”, opposed to that of “abstract pansemy” or “figurative polysemy”.
I AM FAR FROM BEING AN EXPERT IN MATHEMATICS.
Can you describe your typical process when working on a new piece? How do you decide when to personally execute the physical creation of your concepts and when to delegate?
If we are talking about my sculptures, my creative process is always to improvise using maquettes. I don’t make drawings beforehand. I improvise using small-scale Angles, Arcs, and Straight Lines, and when this process enables me to find an interesting composition, my assistants in the factory turn them into a large-scale or monumental works.
The term "Gesamtkunstwerk" is often associated with your body of work. Would you consider your entire oeuvre as a monumental, time-and-space-transcending total work of art? And isn't engaging with your decades-spanning art always a form of "Looking Forward," as suggested by your exhibition title?
That‘s probably the right perspective. As already described, I have been always curious about new developments in art, always extending what was determined as limits in art. Once I developed my “language” and realized that it is universal I could extended my art into different fields and that‘s extremely interesting to me.
Now let’s move on to three questions that go beyond our impressions in Venice: Your works emit a unique energy and vibrancy, seeming to resonate with themselves and their surroundings. This seems almost paradoxical given their conceptual nature and abstraction. Would you agree?
Firstly, I don’t consider my current work to be conceptual, though they do emanate from concepts like disorder, entropy, unpredictability, irreversibility or disintegration, but the formalism they embody through my works is also essential. I try to renew the sculptural language as much as I can through these concepts. As I’ve lived through the conceptual period from its inception, conceptual art has nothing to do with issues of form, color, or composition, and only uses language.
The Venet Foundation on your estate in Le Muy is a sprawling space showcasing artworks by yourself and other contemporary artists. What inspired you to make art accessible in this manner?
The aim of the Foundation in Le Muy is of course to represent my work, but also to show the artistic environment by which I was surrounded in the US mostly, as well as in Europe. They were major figures in Minimal and Conceptual Art. I’ve exhibited alongside them, and they constitute a sort of family for me. The Foundation shows this history and allows visitors to better understand the meaning of my work and how it developed the way it did in this context. There are sculptures collected and shown in the parks, which give emphasis on the spirit of the time, in which they were created and how well they resonate with the surrounding works. You can explore works by Anish Kapoor, James Turrell, Frank Stella, Tony Cragg, etc. Many of those artists are friends and colleagues of mine, which as well underline these similar concepts in art. With the annual summer exhibitions at the Foundation, there is also a thematical point of view, which extends the perception of one artistic expression. We exhibited Robert Barry, Yves Klein, David Tudor, Robert Morris, Claude Viallat and others.
To have created this foundation was for me, a way to ensure that all of these works stay installed in Le Muy permanently, and a way for me, to give thanks to this social setting in which I was able to create and develop my work.
As one of the most internationally exhibited living French artists, what kind of responsibility does this recognition entail?
It is a constant challenge to work on an international level and keep on creating interesting, vivid works, which “reach” their audience. The responsibility has different directions: towards the museums and galleries, with which I work closely, towards major projects in landscapes, which are often supported by collectors, companies or even governments and towards myself and the team. I feel very much supported by many and I like to give back as much as is possible from my side.
And finally, let's daringly take a "Looking Forward": Can you share insights about your next major project?
In this constant worry of self-questioning of what I’ve done so far, I am continuing to explore new ways to present my work, and lately, I’ve been working on generative art by finding solutions that I consider to be very interesting propositions, considerably enlarging the scope of my work.
