What interested me was to replace the subjective vision of artists with rational, objective knowledge, the results of scientific analyses. And there I had a whole unexplored field of language and images that I thought was necessary to show. — Bernar Venet
Bernar Venet's work has been shaped by a persistent question: what remains of art when the artist relinquishes the obligation to compose a recognisable form?
Born in 1941 in Château-Arnoux-Saint-Auban, in the south of France, Venet emerged in the early 1960s with an approach that challenged the inherited distinctions between painting, sculpture and the idea of the artwork itself. Over six decades, he has moved between material experiment, mathematical systems, performance, language and monumental steel sculpture. These developments are not successive styles so much as recurring investigations, repeatedly reopened and tested against new conditions.
Venet's early formation took place in Nice, where he worked as a stage designer at the Opéra de Nice before devoting himself to art. In 1961, while completing military service near Carpiagne, he encountered a flow of tar on a rocky slope. The substance's slow movement, density and resistance to conventional painterly handling suggested a way to make the material itself the subject and agent of the work. From 1961 to 1963 he poured industrial tar onto paper and canvas, allowing gravity and the irregularities of the surface to participate in the result. The dark, compact paintings retained the physical evidence of their making while resisting the expressive gestures then associated with painting.