The museum to visit: Bernar Venet in Muy, or the ambition of “the total work of art”

“Conjugate the verb do in the present and the verb be in the future.” From this apostolate, Bernar Venet (he removed the “d” from his first name when he started out to give himself more chances of being noticed internationally) made a daily way of life. As young as he is talkative, the 82-year-old artist receives at Le Muy, in the foundation he inaugurated in 2014. That is 7 hectares of lush nature dedicated to conceptual and minimal art, where his own creations rub shoulders with those of ” friends”: those rubbed shoulders with in Nice, in the 1960s – Arman, Ben or Yves Klein -, then those frequented in New York – where Bernar Venet lived for forty years -, such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris… Under an azure blue sky, dressed all in white, the master of the place, in no way jaded, sweeps the landscape with his hands with communicative enthusiasm: “I wanted to create a setting of monumental sculptures in perfect harmony with the environment, a total work of art.” The challenge, taken up, is constantly renewed, in the light of the progressive enlargement of the property and the new rooms that come to populate it.

Venet himself continues to create with the sculptural vein that has made him successful all over the world: Arcs, Indeterminate Lines, Angles, Collapses Or Stacks form a protean corpus in wood or steel. Freshly hung on the walls of the Usine extension in a random set of lines, its latest Gribs covered with graphite engage the viewer in “an even more direct confrontation with space and matter”.

Back outside, where, in the middle of the Sculpture Park, stands the most recent unpublished piece by the artist that the cranes and construction trucks have just deserted after several weeks of installation with a line. Located between the Stella chapel and Intersectionthe work of Anish Kapoor, 6 arcs – Perception: Interior/Exterior is the first realization by Bernar Venet, here in collaboration with the architect Charles Berthier, integrating the basement: from a concrete space where the spectator can descend 6 meters underground, six Bows 25 meters long rise towards the sky, leaning against the edge of this buried architecture.

Nearby, the temporary exhibition space is hosting a “double retrospective” of American artist Robert Barry this summer, orchestrated by Mathieu Copeland. From the pioneer of conceptual art across the Atlantic, who built his artistic career around dematerialization, the curator has brought together mural works and sound pieces from the 1970s to the present day. We find the spoken, projected or printed words that occupy a central place in Barry’s work at the border between visual art, poetry and philosophy. Robert Barry is also one of those who inspired Bernar Venet when he arrived in New York in 1966 and who made him switch from the New Realists in Nice to the minimal and conceptual scene of the Big Apple. Since then, he has seen big. His collection, his sculptures, his projects, everything is immense. Like this site that bears his name, both a place of life, a showcase for works by emblematic artists in the history of art of the last sixty years and an “exceptional mental workshop” – nothing is not realized in situ but everything is imagined, thought out, debated. The Venet Foundation is a hive of intense cogitation.