BERNAR VENET • MACADAM 1963

EXHIBITION FROM 12 OCTOBER TO 30 NOVEMBER 2024
OPENING IN THE PRESENCE OF THE ARTIST: SATURDAY 12 OCTOBER 2024 (3-7PM)
STARTING SUNDAY : SUNDAY 13 OCTOBER (2-6PM)

From October 12, the gallery proudly presents for the first time in its entirety the radical and historic photographic series “Macadam Noir” that French conceptual artist Bernar Venet made in 1963. This outstanding event will be one display at the Paris gallery in Le Marais during both Art Basel and Paris Photo.

A precursor of conceptual art and a major figure on the international art scene, Bernar Venet has never shied away from any medium throughout his career: painting, drawing, sound, sculpture, poetry, film and performance. His polymorphous body of work, celebrated the world over, spans more than six decades, yet few of us know that photography has held a special place in his work since its very beginnings in the South of France in the 60s.

From 1961 to 1963, Bernar Venet produced a number of works based on a “principle of equivalence” that enabled him to convey the same content through different media, with the color black as a common thread, this black embodying the refusal of easy communication while praising a form of austerity in opposition to the emerging figuration and dazzling lyrical abstraction of the 1960s. This decade was marked by a radical approach based on constant experimentation, leading to new typologies of sculptural, pictorial, sound and photographic works characterized by neutrality, serial production and the rejection of composition.

For Bernar Venet, photography is indeed necessarily conceptual and experimental. It was photography that enabled him to make his very first artwork (Performance dans les détritus) in 1961. In 1963, he created a photographic series, Macadam Noir, based on close-ups of tarred ground. Conceived as a continuation of his early black monochrome paintings and his Tars, this series is part of this extremely prolific context, and breaks with the use of photography hitherto employed as a means of documenting or bearing witness to an event.

Venet's photography, characterized by a fusion of the discernible and the subtly perceptible, a play with materials and reliefs, and an engagement with the immaterial and ephemeral, manifests an insatiable desire to push the boundaries of the medium. His aim is a continuous interrogation, an ongoing exploration, to better grasp the essence of the art that photography encapsulates. In response to Hans Ulrich Obrist's interview on the occasion of the publication of his book “Photographies” (Ed. rueVisconti), Bernar Venet explains: “As far as I'm concerned, photography has imposed itself as a discipline that has enabled me to enrich the conceptual and visual scope of my work. The status of a work of art is reached when artists, with the utmost rigor, use it, not to refine the technique and offer attractive images, but to question subjects and new potentials”.

The exhibition, which runs at Bigaignon in Le Marais from October 12 to November 30 and can be viewed during both Art Basel Paris and Paris Photo, will present the entire series - 26 silver prints - for the first time, in a scenography designed specifically to showcase this remarkable historical work.

Meanwhile, during the Paris Art Basel week, from 14 to 19 October 2024, the Perrotin gallery opens the group exhibition Panorama, featuring the new series of conceptual works by Bernar Venet titled Generative Angles Paintings. Bernar Venet will present eight radical works from his Generative Angles Paintings series. This project has been ongoing for one year, but he will never see its final results or the finished works. Approaching visual sculpture and based on complex computer coding, these works are digital paintings of images generated by an algorithm. When these paintings are produced, framed, and hung in the Salle de Bal, the artist does not participate or even see the physical exhibition. In this project, the artist discovers an infinity of formal possibilities and unexpected configurations that correspond conceptually to his latest large works.

Born in 1941, Bernar Venet is considered the most exhibited French artist in the world, his work having been shown for over 50 years in some of the most prestigious museums, and is included in renowned collections such as MoMA (New York), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), LACMA (Los Angeles), National Gallery of Art (Washington), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Kunsthalle Hamburg (Germany) and many others.