Bernar Venet

2 angles supplementaires 131° et 49°, 1976

Bernar Venet moved to New York in 1966 in the immediate vicinity of Frank Stella. He got to know numerous minimal and concept artists at the Dwan gallery. Issues relating to the analysis of language and meaning in art evolved at the same time as Venet developed an interest in the papers of semiotician Jacques Bertin. Bertin’s deliberations on the concept of linguistic signs combine with the ›monosemic‹. ›Monosemic‹, in simplified terms, can be explained that only a technical drawing has a single meaning, for instance by providing precise instructions as to how a machine part has to be manufactured. From the mid-1970s, these deliberations developed into the hallmark of Venet’s paintings, among them the work 2 angles supplementaires (131° et 49°) was created. The two angles join each other and are arranged on a large semicircle, a format that resembles Frank Stella’s ›shaped canvases‹. In doing so, Venet established a format and a rationality whose main feature is the determinate line – a line which gains its shape through mathematical calculation.