Though we may not have kept this article of aesthetic faith intact, we do tend to feel that interpretation is never done that there is always more to say about a work of art. Venet resists this feeling. Suspicious of theory's narrowness, he is equally skeptical of the expectation that the meanings of art will flow for as long as we continue to seek them. And it brought into sharp focus the impatience with ambiguity that had animated Venet from the outset. With his earliest works the tar paintings of 1961- he dispensed with color and texture.
Oil paint is expressive almost by default.
His layers of tar defeated expressiveness, reducing signs of the hand to evidence that flat, rectangular surfaces had been covered with an ordinary material. On Romanticism's Gothic margins, black acquires a heavy burden of symbolic meaning. In Venet's tar paintings, black is simply black. Next came cardboard reliefs, then tubular sculptures cut from plastic piping ordered from industrial suppliers. He could not, of course, control the responses of viewers, who were free to elaborate the clarities of his art into whatever manifold of meanings they liked.