Ceysson & Bénétière is pleased to present Venet at Panéry, on view from July 4th to September 27th, 2025 (extended until November 2nd, 2025), in the heart of the Domaine de Panéry, in the Gard region of southern France. Born from a long-standing bond between Bernar Venet and the estate’s owners, Jacqueline and Olivier Ginon, this project sets up a dialogue between recent works and earlier pieces.
The exhibition explores the omnipresence of the line — a fundamental element in Bernar Venet’s work, where art and science converge in a constant state of tension. “The artistic project does not consist in ‘making sculptures out of steel bars,’” writes Thierry Lenain, “but in making present, within an artistic context, lines embodied in steel bars.” Straight, curved, or indeterminate, these lines rise, lean, unfold or collapse, as if testing the very limits of form and gravity. Suspended, arched, or stacked, they challenge the notion of sculpture not as volume, but as phenomenon.
Along the way, visitors will also encounter the Gribs series, initiated almost accidentally in the early 2010s. “Hundreds of scribbles are drawn on small cards,” recounts Olivier Schefer. “Some lines are cut with an oxy-fuel torch; others are deliberately drawn with eyes closed to achieve a freer, more nervous, more uncontrolled gesture.” This controlled disorder—evoking a burst of chaos—marks a new phase in the artist’s trajectory, expanding once more the field of possibilities.
Finally, the Stacks—those piles of corten steel arcs—encapsulate the radical nature of Venet’s gesture: “My goal is to reduce interpretation so that my sculpture is perceived in its physical, intrinsic reality,” the artist declares. “A real object in a real world.”
Since his early piles of coal in the 1960s, Venet has explored the notion of immanence, while asserting a raw materiality: “Steel seems to me the ideal material... both noble and neutral, malleable enough for what I want to do.”
A central figure in the dialogue between art and mathematics, Bernar Venet emerged on the international scene in the 1970s. Now based in New York and Le Muy—where he established his foundation—he continues to develop a body of work that combines conceptual rigor, visual power, and formal boldness. This exhibition at Domaine de Panéry pays tribute to an extraordinary career and celebrates, in a unique setting, the momentum of a practice in perpetual expansion.
