In the late ’40s, Yves Klein lay on the beach in Nice, looked up at the sky and decided to paint it. A few years later, Bernar Venet – in the same city – looked deeper into the earth for his inspiration. If Yves Klein’s iconic blue monochromes capture the ethereal azur of the south of France, Venet’s black tar paintings are its grotty terrestrial reflection.
The French artist’s early tar works are the first things you see here (after a massive pile of coal). They’re glistening liquid frozen on fragile cardboard. They’re grubby, elemental, brutal monochromes. They reflect you but repulse you. Cool.
He didn’t stick with monochromes for long though. The works that follow show his obsession with mathematics and the stock market – big diagrammatic images of angles and equations.
Since then, he’s turned his attention to monumental public sculptures: big sheets and beams of corten steel, plonked all over the world. Honestly, they leave me worse than cold, they leave me frostbitten with boredom. There are a handful of smaller versions here. Seriously, IDGAF.
But the early period of work – from monochrome to mathematics – is Venet at his most interesting. He’s French conceptual minimalism’s darker, more cerebral shadow. Tar, coal, maths – all things that are hazardous for your health, but make for great art.