PRESENTATION: Bernar Venet-From Rational to Virtual (1966–2024)

Bernar Venet is a pioneer of Conceptual art. Throughout his career spanning more than 60 years, Venet has been known for producing work that has never ceased to pose questions, and for having been the principal innovator to introduce mathematical linguistics into art. “Bernar Venet constantly challenges the limits of his ideas, possibilities, life, and art as a process.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Art Museum Riga Bourse Archive

For Bernar Venet making art means articulating and transforming while involving various disciplines – science, mathematics, music, architecture, physics, geometry, as well as what is happening in the media space. The exhibition “From Rational to Virtual (1966–2024)” showcases 8 paintings, both examples from the early stages of artist’s career and new works. The central axis of this exposition is mathematics, which, in Venet’s words, encompasses “the greatest abstraction ever created”. The most recent works included in the exhibition are the result of a two-year project involving generative art. These digitally-painted pieces are two-dimensional equivalents of Venet’s sculptural “Effondrements” in which arcs and angles fall to the ground to create unexpected configurations by obeying the natural laws of gravity. Algorithms are used to generate images – a new technique for Venet and in keeping with his experimental spirit. “I borrow these formulas, these “figures” from science books. It sometimes happens that I add an equation to a figure I have selected, because it complements it, but also because it reduces the formal aspect of certain selected subjects and makes them more complex and less able to be immediately interpreted as a “beautiful image”. My subjects are chosen for their novelty, for their visual originality. And often because of their “difference”, their “distance” from everything I have learnt about art. The use of mathematics, in my practice, is meant to introduce another reality. This is a language that has its own formal peculiarities, its own organization, its own aesthetic rules. What interests me here is the richness of a proposition freed from the stylistic restraints of the kind of art that identifies with the great historical movements of the 20th century,” states Bernar Venet. Although Bernar Venet is internationally known for his monumental forms, the artist has worked across a wide range of media: painting, installation, drawing, sculpture, stage design, music composition, and even debuting as a choreographer. Five years of intense activity in the midst of the New York art scene enabled him to adopt an original approach marked by bringing monosemic signs into the field of art. This work contrasted with what we’re used to seeing in painting, particularly the polysemic signs in figuration and the pansemic signs of abstraction. This totally radical work, the result of a deliberate six-year pause for theoretical reflection, surged forward anew with the creation of the reliefs and sculptures that became better known to the public. In 2000, Venet decided to return to painting with the presentation of mathematical equations and figures from scientific books to demonstrate the immense visual richness of this rational world that artists have always neglected.

Photo: Bernar Venet. Related to: “Parametric Ordinary Differential Equation of the First Order in Two Dimensions”. 2000. Acrylic on canvas, varnished. @ ADAGP Paris. Publicity photo

Info: Curators: Una Meistere, Daiga Rudzāte, Art Museum Riga Bourse, Doma laukums 6, Centra rajons, Rīga, Latvia, Duration: 25/1-27/4/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu & Sat-Sun 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-20:00, https://lnmm.gov.lv/