Bernar Venet

See, what I aspire to, is to be a good artist. One who, through diverse disciplines such as painting, sculpture, poetry, video, music and performance, will someday be recognised for their work.

Since I was 20, I have been trying to develop a conceptual framework built around my preference for simplicity. Over the course of my career, several visual shocks have influenced my approach to art, particularly towards sculpture. One of those was the image of a tar flow over a cliff. Very early on, I was interested in art forms that challenged my preconceptions and made me raise questions, like Malevich’s “Suprematist Composition: White on White” (1918). At the age of 12 or 13, I understood that the source of art was creation and that art was not only a pictorial activity made by a painter or a sculptor, but rather the creation of new things. Throughout my career, I have tried to constantly question myself because I believe that there is still an infinite number of things to create.

Yes, of course. I am not someone who believes that everything has already been done in art, quite the opposite, in my opinion, this idea implies a great deal of naivety because it is impossible to anticipate the future. Discoveries are made through experience, and only those who live art as the adventure it is will be able to put forward innovative proposals. Let me give you a few examples: Courbet was convinced that Art History had come to an end because there were no more new figurative subjects to paint. Believing that he had exhausted all subjects, he reached the point to paint rocks in the sea. A few centuries before, Giotto thought that one could only paint religious subjects, as at that time, the clergy was the main patron of the arts. If he had been asked to do a landscape, he would have probably found it offensive. Tracing Art History, we can see this pattern repeating itself. Impressionists would never have understood the “White on White” square. Gradually, the range of subject matter broadened, until Van Gogh painted a chair with a pair of shoes next to it… It is hardly surprising that his contemporaries were not quite convinced.

In my opinion, a good artist is someone who, by genuinely questioning things, makes Art History move forward”. There are maybe a dozen per generation. Many artists are talented and capable of creating well-painted works that will surely be appreciated, but will they make Art History? That’s a question mark. I am obviously not saying that I am writing this History myself either, it is not for me or my contemporaries to decide, but for future generations. However, it should be the ultimate goal of an artist. As Cézanne claimed with total honesty: “If someone were to tell me that I would never be exhibited in the Louvre, I would stop painting right away.” A true artist is not in for pleasure, but for research, like a scientist. Of course, they must also be talented enough to create high-quality works.

Yes, of course, it is always a pleasure. Place Vendôme is a very central and visited place. I had already made an exhibition on the Champ de Mars in 1994, and then another at the Tuileries, but I still think that the one that made the biggest impression on me was Versailles. What is great about “Difféomorphisme et discontinuité” is this sort of trilogy that we were able to create between Perrotin’s exhibition spaces and Place Vendôme. Until now, I have remained quite sober in terms of Parisian galleries and the art market, so now I have an opportunity to finally have a real impact in the city.

Every year, the Place Vendôme exhibits the work of a new artist and so my old friend Jérôme Sans and I decided that this would be the time. In the context of Art Paris taking place at the same time, this “triptych” exhibition just felt natural.

We had already crossed paths on several occasions before we actually met at Art Basel. At first, I didn’t think I wanted to have my work exhibited in a Parisian gallery, but then I met Tom-David Bastok and Dylan Lessel, who visited me at the Fondation du Muy, in the south of France. They are serious, friendly and full of humour. I must say that I was impressed by their professionalism. They finally convinced Emmanuel to come, and five minutes later he was talking to me as if it was done thing already: “In Hong Kong, I don’t know if we will be able to bring the works in”. The three of them seduced and enthused me when they told me they were offering me all these spaces… I couldn’t but accept. I always told myself that if I came back to Paris, it would be in a big way.

A human encounter, certainly, but also and above all a professional one.

You have to take into account that when I left, in the sixties, the context was very different. When I started to be active as an artist, the international atmosphere in the art world was moving away from abstract expressionism towards figuration. In the United States, that was the birth of pop art. And so narrative figuration developed as an avant-garde. I wasn’t interested in figuration, it didn’t really speak to me. I prefer a more unadorned work, art charged with strong theoretical and conceptual content.

In any case, I’m clearly going towards abstraction, with paintings made of tar. My argument was the following: “I don’t use tar to make paintings, the tar itself is the artwork”. At the time, the art world didn’t really understand this practice, even the most cutting-edge, J Gallery, laughed in my face when I said I wanted to exhibit a pile of coal in their spaces. I was simply outdated to them, I was still abstract. In those years, a big modern art exhibition meant figurative art. So, at the age of 22, I was already deemed old school.  That’s why I flew to New York to try my luck. When I visited the Whitney Museum and saw a Minimal Art exhibition I knew I had found my artistic family, people doing abstract, relatively geometric art, with industrial paintings. In 1966, they were much more innovative than I was. It was a genuine slap in the face, so I stopped doing cardboard reliefs and found myself in a movement that was even more avant-garde than Pop Art or New Realism. A few artists like Daniel Buren ventured into it here in France, in a more abstract and rigorous way, but it was really in the United States that I ended up finding my place.

Absolutely. I became friends with fascinating artists like Sol LeWitt, Carl André, and Walter De Maria.

I am very pleased to be able to exhibit paintings that are relatively unknown to the Parisian and French public. Here (Galerie Perrotin, rue de Turenne), we find several works of different styles, including “Saturations“. There is also a series of white paintings inspired by works I made in 1966, only this time they are made with machines, which gives them a new freshness.

Not even a full day, the installation process is actually quite fast.

No, I don’t have any ideas prior to their conception. We all work together with the team and improvise. It can happen that we lay 10 arches, that everything holds together very well and that when we place the 11th, everything collapses. The idea is to play with this movement without my participation, without me deciding anything. The normal process of a “collapse” is the following: we superimpose several arches and then pull on them with a forklift so that they collapse in a random way. In Place Vendôme, however, we were unable to do this because the parkings underneath the square make the ground too fragile to support the collapse of several very heavy arches. So we had to control their fall.

It would most likely be Marcel Duchamp, although meeting Man Ray was also quite memorable. I must say, however, that someone I highly admire nowadays for his astonishing capacity to rethink his work year after year is Frank Stella. Something that I often criticise about artists in the 50s, is that once they found a style that suited them, they stuck to it out of convenience, keeping it unchanged for the rest of their careers. Stella has done the opposite, he is continually reinventing and revisiting his practice. At 87, he is a misunderstood genius, a great friend of mine, and I own 24 of his works…