Bernar Venet's Generative Art Debut

T he French artist Bernar Venet has always explored the creative potential of chance. Venet established his credentials back in 1963 with Tas de charbon (Pile of Coal), a work both literal and radical in its use of materials and embrace of accidental composition. He also has a long-held fascination with mathematics and the creative power of algorithms. In the mid-1960s he began painting blown-up equations, theorems and geometric diagrams. And for almost 30 years Venet has entangled mathematical certainty and random outcomes – the potential of geometry, straight lines, arcs and angles, to fall into chaotic disorder.

“I’ve always challenged the idea of the ideal composition,” says Venet. “It’s a matter of context. And if you work in a context or dispersion of the unexpected, there is no ideal solution and everything is possible. Randomness suddenly becomes the whole.”

In his Accident series, begun in 1996, Venet arranges steel bars against a wall and then pushes them, so they clank and crash to the ground to form a new, random-within-limits composition. When he began there was no push; no chance rearrangement. “I was creating a maquette, a model on a table, and inadvertently knocked it,” he recalls. “Suddenly it was a pile of straight lines and reminded me of the scattered configuration of Tas de charbon. Initially I thought it didn’t work – you can’t mix geometry and chaos. But then I started to think: instead of these being antagonistic ideas, what if they are complementary? Then you create something new.”

His newest work, or series of works – available through Sotheby’s Metaverse as the second release in its Gen Art programme – is EVENT. The title is an anagram of Venet, and is drawn from a more artful play of words by Marcel Duchamp. Over his career Venet has rubbed shoulders with the giants of 20th-century art, including Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, while his own work is in the collections of MoMA, the Centre Pompidou and the Guggenheim.

When Venet met Duchamp in the late 1960s he told him of his ambition to “dematerialise” art. “I explained to him that although I was a visual artist, I was trying to create work which was non-visual,” Venet says. In response, Duchamp wrote “La vente de vent est l’event de Venet” on a newspaper in front of him – cheekily suggesting that Venet was “selling the wind”. Venet’s latest “event” is his most ambitious dematerialisation yet.

Now 82, Venet calls his earlier works such as Accident “analogue generative sculptural performances”, and his enthusiasm to use any medium made it inevitable that he would be drawn to the digital sphere: employing algorithms to create almost infinitely variable generative artworks.

Venet says it was Berlin-based writer, curator and “culture-generator” Viola Lukács who joined the dots for him. In 2015 she curated the MetraMetria show in Budapest, which included work by Venet. They worked together in 2021 on a series of NFTs for a Berlin retrospective, and last year on ISOTOPE, an immersive generative installation inspired by Venet’s early work with equations and diagrams.

“It was Viola who really introduced me to generative art,” says Venet. “My generation aren’t into it but I saw it as a way to extend the scope of my activity. In 1967 I wrote a statement arguing that there shouldn’t be style in art anymore; as with Pollock or Rothko, there should just be new content developed through different media. It was considered radical at the time but it fits with what we are doing with generative art today.”

For EVENT, Lukács has worked with Venet to create a digital environment for his sculptural “performances”. “For three-and-a-half months we have been trying to map Bernar’s thinking, regarding aesthetics, materiality, light and shadow and density,” says Lukács. “We are looking into how gravity works in the digital space; how his sculptures behave. We want all the outcomes to align with this taste.”

Venet has fully embraced the potential of digital processes. “I tell my assistants: ‘Look at what this computer can give us; things we cannot imagine, things that never existed before.’” He is clear that he views EVENT as more than a digital simulacra of his performance pieces. “I want it to look like my work but I also want to add colour, which I don’t usually do,” he says. “In this case, I want the work to be seductive, to give pleasure.” When they are happy with the settings and power of the EVENT engine, they will set it to work, creating 500 unique works of digital art: random entanglements of Venet’s sculptural forms.

“So much remains to be created that you have to experiment all the time, and this is what I’m doing,” he continues. “Even if I’m bending steel to make sculptures or making paintings on the wall with a bar of steel, I’m also working with generative art and making paintings with the computer. I have no pleasure in repeating what I thought or did yesterday.”

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GEN ART / BERNAR VENET Presents EVENT

_{Cover image: Bernar Venet photographed at the Venet Foundation at Le May. Photo: Laura Stevens/Modds, Camera Press London}