Bernard Quentin

Video • Portrait
EP1. Letters
EP2. cybernetic art

« Bernard Quentin, a semiotic art, a lightshouse towards the post-modern universality of tomorrow  »   Pierre Restany

Bernard Quentin was born in 1923. He settled in Paris in around 1950 to study painting, sculpture, and architecture at the National Superior University of Decorative Art and the National Superior University of Fine Art. Between 1942 and 1944, he was actively involved in the French Resistance within the “Maniple” network. In 1945, he became friends with Pablo Picasso when he was spending some time at the “House of French Thought” (Maison de la Pensée Française). This encounter and his discovery of Guernica will notably influence the abstract and expressionist writing of an unparalleled book dealing with the horrors of war and the death camps that he exhibited at the Under-Thirty Fair that year, before resuming his classes at the National Superior University of Fine Arts; the war had put a stop to them. He then established himself in the artistic milieu of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district and frequented existentialist and surrealist groups such as the painters Wols and Camille Bryen as well as Isidore Isou, the theoretician of Lettrism. Quentin is also part of Boris Vian’s friend group alongside Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Anne-Marie Cazalis, and Juliette Gréco with whom he then lived in a room under the roof of Servandoni street. He exhibited his first ideograms-writings in 1945 on Gay-Lussac street and presented his first solo exhibition at the House of University in Paris, which toured to Zurich, Geneva, and Bern the following year. In Switzerland, he discovered poetic primitivism as well as oriental and African influences in many of Paul Klee’s works. He was so fascinated by cuneiform writing, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Scandinavian runes, and cave art that he then moved away from abstract expressionism to create new ideograms and centers his approach around the question of letters and signs.

After meeting the art dealer Aimé Maeght in Cannes in 1947, he took part in exhibitions with the group Dazzled hands, which brought together Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, Jean Signovert, Alexander Calder, and Antoni Tàpies, and became friends with Pierre Dmitrienko, François Arnal, and Serge Rezvani. His first research on the origins of language had led him to travel, particularly to the South of France and Italy. Quentin then headed for Nordic countries and went up and down Scandinavia and Lapland. Back in Europe, he returned to Switzerland, Germany, and Italy where he discovered the futuristic works of monumental automatic writing. In 1951, he developed the concept of an estate designed for artists alongside architect Le Corbusier in Sainte-Baume. The artists could build it themselves by drawing inspiration from the animal kingdom. Quentin collaborated on various architectural projects intended to integrate poetry and color into the monumental scriptural environment using mosaics, stained glass windows, tapestries, and green spaces intended to add to urban polychromy. By 1954, he was on the road again and traveled to South America (Brazil and Peru), West Africa where he painted frescoes in Niamey and Bamako, and several capital cities of Eastern Europe (Warsaw, Moscow, Prague). He then returned to Paris where he exhibited some of his works at Galerie Stadler, Galerie Craven, and Iris Clert’s house. In 1957, his homage to Monet exhibited simultaneously at André Schoeller’s house and at Galerie Saint-Germain inspired this comment from Pierre Restany: “This is the moment when Quentin’s writing reaches its utmost dilution in cosmic space: air, water, light.” These years were particularly characterised by a gradual abandonment of tiny signs for a looser, more structured and gestural writing.

The 1960s marked a turning point. Words became the subject of painting, from which they would soon emancipate themselves. Bernard Quentin moved to Milan, where he became friends with Fontana, who professed spatialism, an expanded art freed from the restrictions imposed by a canvas. He met Yves Klein, Spoerri, and Arman, and carried out his first research with Olivetti’s oscilloscopes and computers. As a pioneering artist, he used the Bic pen during his automatic writing sessions and experimented with electronic writing as well. He believed that the tools of visual communication would soon put an end to painting altogether. Salvador Dalí referred to him as “the pioneer of cybernetic art and electronic writing.” In an excerpt from the 1968 special program focused on different forms of expression of avant-garde groups (broadcast on ORTF and entitled “16 Millions of Young People”), a journalist asked Bernard Quentin if he had abandoned classical painting and sculpture. The artist’s response was not ambiguous:

“Yes. I think painting is over. Classical sculpture, that is to say bronze, marble or plaster, is completely finished. It no longer corresponds to any means of expression of the 20th century. It perhaps corresponded to the vision of the world that we would have had during the Renaissance and throughout the 19th century, when we thought that Man was at the center of the universe and that the artist could, in his studio, look at his navel and distribute masterpieces for a small elite. The artist’s vision has already changed; it is no longer an individual vision in which the artist sees himself at the center of the world. I think the artist has to go inside the factory and try, through his worldview, to perhaps modify or create things on an industrial scale.”

His plastic research beyond the classical forms of painting and sculpture of the early 1960s coincided with his newfound passion for air and pneumatic sculpture. He produced totemic statues and his first inflatable sculptures, including “The Cybules” and “The Venus of Chicago,” which would be seen as monumental works of art in landscapes foreshadowing Land Art.

In 1963, he exhibited a pulsating inflatable sculpture with programmed breathing, “Cybule III,” at the World’s Fair in New York City, and made friends with Liechtenstein and Warhol. He also became the first designer to create 100% inflatable seats (in particular, his crescent chair created for the French department store Printemps), which were presented in 1963 at Iris Clert’s gallery in Paris in an exhibition with futuristic ambition (“The Show of the Year 2104”). He returned to Italy to produce other metal structures in welded PVC, which he exhibited in 1966 at the “Ball Room” of the Waldorf Astoria in Central Park in New York City, in Paris at Gunther Sachs’ studio in Neuilly, and at the Blow-Up in Milan. Moreover, he produced a series of art pieces that went up for sale in the United States and Japan and were sold by the Adamoli group in Milan that same year.

“My sculptures can simulate life because I can manage to make them evolve, breathe, throb, and shudder through some programming. I can even get them to change their mood if I want to. They can have their regulation. (…) Since I can’t represent reality as I see it, I am trying, precisely through the second degree by palpitations, tremors, to figure out reality by all this tactile side, all the intimate rhythms, the great cosmic rhythms themselves, and the whole mystery of biology” (interview for “the avant-garde,” 1968.)

In 1997, he co-founded the ART+ collective alongside Jesus Rafael Soto, Jean Messagier, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Pierre Restany, and Serge Rezvani. The collective aimed to extend art to the environment through monumental additions. He developed his “art language” (project BABEL 62 renamed “QuentinBabelweb” in 1998), a language based on universal graphic signs that are understandable for all. “The discovery of a universal language was necessary, and to achieve that goal, symbols that are understandable for all had to be invented. However, the meaning of symbols may differ from one continent to another. This is why I used symbols that can be used by everyone, creating a universal side. I based it on Kufic and Zen calligraphy, where each artist adds something in addition to the meaning.” In Bernard Quentin’s universal language, the color of the signs situates their grammar: blue for nouns, green for adjectives, red for verbs, orange for articles and pronouns. His writing system, designed to unite mankind, consists of three thousand signs that can mean anything and everything. Graffiti, stenography, hieroglyphics, pictograms, optical fibers, and electronic letters form a veritable “semiotic art.”

Video • Portrait Bernard Quentin
EP1. Letter
EP2. Cybernetic art