Intro: On 13 September 2025, the lecture “Archetypes,” delivered by the renowned French artist Bernar Venet and chaired by Tao Tao, Assistant Researcher at the Institute of Art Studies, Fudan University, took place in the atrium of the Fudan University Art Museum. In the lecture Venet surveyed several decades of his artistic practice, conveying both the core ideas that have guided his work and his expansive vision for future projects.
The first part of the lecture concentrated on Venet’s early production and the evolution of his ideas. In 1961, while serving in the military, he established his first studio; an accidental experience from that period proved pivotal for his later work. During a walk he noticed tar flowing down a cliff behind the barracks. The pitch-black color of the tar and the way it moved—appearing to assert the law of gravity—provided him with rich inspiration. Venet had no interest in merely repeating predecessors; the material qualities of tar, its capacity to replace paint, and its ability to render gravity itself as a visible agent opened a new artistic vocabulary for him. For a time he would scatter discarded cardboard across the studio floor and pour viscous, slowly flowing pigments onto them, letting the fluids run and drip to demonstrate an almost autonomous choreography of gravity, free from human intervention. For similar reasons he also produced several photographic works featuring himself lying on the ground; yet the framing and poses in those photographs revealed a controlled, constructed aspect that contrasted with the apparent spontaneity of his poured works.
Venet was also deeply influenced by Yves Klein’s monochromes and his experiments with monochromatic composition. The internal identity of a work and the expansion of artistic possibility across media became central tenets of Venet’s practice. After leaving the military he devoted himself to monochrome paintings that filled the entire support with black, and he extended the notion of “canvas” to include cardboard, book pages, and other objects. This both echoed his earlier experiments and suggested painting’s capacity to absorb forms of expression from other arts, such as literature. For Venet this led to a persistent characteristic of his work: its self-referentiality. That quality can be traced back to the early twentieth-century revolution in abstraction, when artists led by Kandinsky attempted to detach color from representational reference so that painting would no longer point to anything outside itself, thereby achieving a purity akin to instrumental music without language. Inspired by this lineage, Venet produced a black book made exclusively of pure black pages with no narrative content, a deliberate nod to formalist art discourse.
Venet’s sources of inspiration, he emphasized, were not always theoretical; chance also played a role. Once, while taking a break from making black paintings because the smell of tar had become unbearable, he noticed a road being repaired nearby: a heap of gravel mixed with tar. He saw in that mix a correspondence to his black paintings—if his tar paintings represented two-dimensional purity, then that heap of gravel and tar constituted a three-dimensional counterpart. He proceeded to recreate such sculptures using charcoal and tar several times; although the material traces of those works have not survived, their status as sculptures carries enduring theoretical significance. This episode also illustrates Venet’s exacting standard for what it means to be an artist: producing beautiful paintings or sculptures alone does not suffice, because apart from decorative effects and aesthetic pleasure they offer little; true artistic authorship, for Venet, entails a capacity to rethink the concept and definition of art itself.
Venet’s sculptures bear some resemblance to Robert Morris’s earthworks: they can be shown in multiple locations without destroying the identity of an original, and they subvert the fetishism of tactile presence associated with Rodin’s sculptures. For related reasons Venet’ s subsequent photographic work abandoned conventional composition altogether, simultaneously breaking with earlier artistic habits and maintaining the self-referential continuity of his practice.
By the 1960s, as abstraction was declining and Pop and a renewed realism gained prominence, Venet—who had recently arrived in the United States—felt somewhat displaced. The rapid rise of Minimalism, however, offered him a new direction. Minimalist artists were often more radical in their approaches; their mimicry and use of large-scale industrial production prompted Venet to reassess his cardboard paintings as objects that were themselves industrial. Minimalism’s critical stance toward industry led Venet to a new set of questions: rather than extracting meaning from objects, why not go further and address the information those objects embodied?
This idea produced a decisive shift in his practice. Venet began to inscribe mathematical formulas and their graphs directly onto canvases, a move that disengaged his work from both figurative and abstract painting traditions and provoked debate about artistic legitimacy. In defense he argued that these works share the same historical predicament as early figurative painting—humanity’s earliest art was essentially abstract, and it was figurative art that later faced suspicion for disrupting conventions. He suggested that resistance arises when familiar concepts undergo definitional change. Accordingly, he continued to pursue his conceptual inquiries and in the 1970s incorporated information from domains external to art—stock market data, meteorological records—into his works.
In 1971 Venet abruptly suspended artistic production and turned to self-directed study in philosophy, semiotics, and structuralism. During this period he encountered Jacques Bertin’ s tripartite classification of visual images: beyond the common abstract and figurative types, Bertin identified a third category made up of mathematical images and maps. Seen together, abstract images, figurative images, and mathematical images correspond to three kinds of sign systems—pansemic (broadly meaningful), polysemic (multiple meanings), and monosemic (single, determinate meaning)—through which the informational content of images becomes increasingly specific and the communication process reaches greater clarity.
Six years later Venet resumed making work. He retained his commitment to self-referentiality and began to focus on the arc as a formal motif that would come to play a central role in subsequent pieces. Observing an arched wooden panel that had fallen to the ground, he was inspired to produce wooden sculptures that directly referenced geometric forms in their material presence. He went on to make works in straight lines, angles, arcs, and related configurations. This turn expanded his practice toward sculpture while preserving his radical inclination to introduce extraneous, non-art information into his art.
Entering the new century, Venet embraced the transformative potential of new technological media. He long considered his work to be generative; in the digital age the intervention of algorithmic black boxes and the tokenization of art as NFTs further attenuated the artist’s manual role. Venet read this not as loss but as an advance toward reconfiguring art’s conceptual boundaries—an outcome consonant with Michelangelo’s dictum of “creating with the mind rather than with the hand.”
Venet ended the lecture by returning to his sculptural practice and its mathematical self-reference, as well as by outlining an ambitious, large-scale project he hopes will be remembered worldwide. Titled Global Communication / Global Humanity, the proposal envisages giant inclined straight-line sculptures installed in major cities around the world as landmarks of human connection. Beneath each sculpture, a cavernous room would house large, real-time displays enabling visitors in different locations to communicate; virtual reality tools would allow participants to experience life in distant places immersively. This, Venet said, is the project he is currently dreaming of realizing on a planetary scale.
After the lecture a question-and-answer session followed. Audience members asked about the relationship between pansemic and monosemic perception in Venet’s work; whether he might produce kinetic or moving sculptures; how effectively his conceptual premises are conveyed to viewers; and the influence of formalist critique on his practice, as well as whether introducing external knowledge into his art risks contradicting its self-referentiality. Venet responded to each question in turn. The event concluded to warm applause.
