Bernar Venet (b. 1941)

An exquisite oilstick painting of the artist’s iconic, signature motif, Indeterminate Line (1990) by Bernar Venet reflects the artist’s assiduous, clinical research into the formal nature of the line. Venet is best known for his monumental steel realisations of his arcing lines and though somewhat reminiscent of an architectural drawing, the painting is less a study for Venet’s sculptural practice than it is a painterly exploration of material and form in its own right, its rich rendering of light and physical wear and tear conveying an affecting sensitivity to visual detail. Venet first came to prominence as an artist in the early 1960s in Paris, exhibiting alongside several of Yves Klein’s Nouveaux Realistes, before moving to New York in 1966; there he emerged at the forefront of the city’s burgeoning Conceptual Art, developing a praxis that began to play with both language, as well as the conceptual languages of mathematics and logic which would go on to underpin his series of Linées indeterminates. ‘I’ve read many books written by some of the most prominent scientists and researchers. I think that their intuitive process is very similar to that of artists’ Venet has said, ‘It happens that the most implausible hypotheses are at the origin of original ideas and have the richest potential. One must then prove the validity of these first intuitions—they may perhaps bear fruit or they become something else even more unpredictable. Some think that scientific thought is more oriented toward reason, demonstration, and objectivity. I sometimes feel quite close to these methods, which have the advantage of short-circuiting the wait for inspiration’ (B. Venet, in L. Tansini, ‘A Conversation with Bernar Venet, A Renaissance Artist of the Third Millennium’, Sculpture, Vol. 23 No. 4, May 2004, https://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag04/may04/venet/venet.shtml  [accessed Mar 24, 2017]).