Alto presents ART 01 – BERNAR VENET, a limited edition of 10 pieces created in collaboration with the internationally renowned French artist, known for his work on movement and material, as well as his monumental sculptures. This marks the first time Bernar Venet has turned his creative vision to a watch.
Alto signs a creative and artistic collaboration with Bernar Venet
Alto presents ART 01 – BERNAR VENET, a limited edition of 10 pieces created in collaboration with the internationally renowned French artist, known for his work on movement and material, as well as his monumental sculptures. This marks the first time Bernar Venet has turned his creative vision to a watch.
B
ernar Venet is a central figure on the
international art scene.
He is an artist who has consistently pushed
the boundaries of what art can express,
using a deliberately limited vocabulary —
the line, the arc, the angle — and a simple,
almost Spartan idea:
form holds value only insofar as it reveals
the laws that govern it and the accidents
that undo it.
His entire artistic journey unfolds within
this tension between the determined and the
indeterminate, between geometric order and
entropy.
Born in 1941 in Château-Arnoux, Venet trained
far from academic institutions, through
direct engagement with matter itself.
As early as 1961, he began working with tar —
a humble, industrial material — and in 1963,
he poured ten cubic meters of anthracite
directly onto the ground: The Pile of Coal.
A foundational gesture — a sculpture
without prescribed form or dimensions — the
work marked the end of composition in
favor of a process:
“to show the material” allowing chance and
gravity to shape the piece anew with each
installation.
This breakthrough — widely documented by
institutions and retrospectives —
established Venet as one of the pioneers of
indeterminate sculpture, where form is a
consequence rather than a decision.
In 1966,
Venet moved to New York, where he immersed himself in the conceptual and
minimalist avant-garde, refining his artistic language. Diagrams, equations, and
scientific records became artworks; painting itself evolved into a “proposition”
as much as a surface. It was during this period that his formal triptych — lines,
arcs, and angles — was born, a vocabulary that would accompany him
throughout his career.
From the 1970s to the 1980s, Venet drew all the consequences of this choice: Indeterminate Lines, Arcs,
Angles, followed by Collapses, and more recently, performances in which the
fall itself becomes a sculptural act. As he states clearly, his sculptures are
“self-referential” — they speak of their own nature and the conditions of their
emergence. The “accident” — the decision to embrace collapse as method —
becomes a moment of artistic truth. "The day my pieces accidentally fell… I
understood that this was a new field to explore," he recalls, adding that
enlargement alone has never been enough: “it has to work.”
Major milestones mark an international recognition that owes nothing to
spectacle for its own sake, but rather to the coherence of a lifelong
investigation: the Lyon retrospective (2018–2019), retracing 2019–1959 and
gathering nearly 170 works; the occupation of the Louvre-Lens (2021), where
The Hypothesis of Gravity extended a monumental beam collapse across both
interior and exterior landscapes; the 8,000 m² exhibition at Kunsthalle Berlin
(Tempelhof) in 2022, where Venet overturned a series of arcs live with a
forklift — a performance encapsulating his philosophy of the organized fall; and
Paris, 2023: The Parabola of History, at Place Vendôme, curated by Jérôme
Sans. Two Corten steel ensembles — 84.5° Arc x 13 on one side, Collapse: 55
Arcs on the other — disrupted the geometry of the site and silently echoed
the history of the toppled column of 1871.
The culmination of this spatial writing in the real world is Arc Majeur (2019),
erected above the E411 motorway in Wallonia: 60 meters high, 75 meters wide,
several hundred tons of Corten steel. Conceived in 1984 and inaugurated 35
years later, the work stands as one of the largest contemporary sculptures in
Europe.
Throughout his career, Venet’s almost total absence of brand collaborations
reflects his uncompromising autonomy. One exception, now iconic, is the
Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport “Venet,” unveiled at Art Basel Miami in late 2012
and showcased again at the Geneva Motor Show in early 2013. On this car, the
artist projected the W16 engine formulas directly onto its bodywork —
transforming it into a mathematical sculpture in motion. Dubbed "the fastest
artwork ever" by Bugatti, this unique piece stands as a manifesto at the
intersection of art and engineering.
It is within this context that the encounter
with Alto took place. Two years earlier, Thibaud Guittard, founder of the maison, approached Venet
— not to “apply” a style to a product, but to attempt a genuine philosophical
shift in scale: from public monumentality to intimate minuteness; from Corten
steel — materially raw and temporally active — to a precious alloy. Venet
accepted, drawn by the rigor of the brief: if one cannot betray the logic of
the work, then everything remains to be invented.
The collaboration began with a question of material. Under the joint direction
of Thibaud Guittard and Raphaël Abeillon (Creative Director), the ALTO team
mobilized its finest partners to identify a material with the ideal aesthetic,
mechanical, and horological properties.
After extensive experimentation, the choice fell upon a bronze composition
with a patina both unique and stabilized. Bronze, a noble and non-magnetic
material, offered the possibility of transposing art onto the wrist.
The selection of the alloy, the development and stabilization of the patina, and
the very construction of the watch called upon the advanced expertise of
three essential partners, responsible respectively for the case, the dial, and the
patina process.
Dozens of tests were required — in close consultation with the artist — to
achieve the living color and texture reminiscent of the warm brown tones that
characterize Venet’s Collapses, while ensuring the necessary stabilization for a
wearable piece.
The technical constraints inherent to this new material demanded a complete
rethinking of the watch’s construction — to honor the nature of the bronze
while preserving Alto’s identity.
Like Bernar Venet’s art, the stabilized patina that protects the material will
continue to evolve slowly, accompanying the wearer throughout their lifetime.
Then remained the face of the watch: the design of the dial. Rather than a
motif, Raphaël Abeillon and Bernar Venet chose to create a micro-sculpture —
a composition of interlaced arcs, a true collapse of the initial architecture in
miniature, forming the topography of the dial.
Its apparent casualness evokes random fall, yet it is meticulously orchestrated,
echoing Venet’s monumental collapses. The dial is no longer a surface but a
stage — with hollows, ridges, shadows, and interstices that hold the grain of
the patina; the hands brush against the peaks; the indexes are reduced to a
minimal punctuation, so as not to frame the sculpture.
On the wrist, the weight and texture of the bronze make the object a presence
rather than an instrument.
One wears a fragment of an idea — transposed from the urban scale to the
human scale.
The co-creation with the artist was constant, from the selection of the patina
to the composition of the collapse. The working sessions between Venet and
Raphaël Abeillon had the tone of genuine exchange — sincerity, trials, and
revisions — until they reached that point of balance where the timepiece
remains fully horological (in volume, reliability, and wearability) while
unapologetically affirming itself first as sculpture.
The three technical partners, each bringing their passion, culture, and expertise,
contributed a diversity of know-how that marks the completion of an object
unprecedented in both its execution and artistic dimension.
This translation of scale is felt through contrast.
In Venet’s work, Corten steel — an industrial, “non-noble” alloy — rusts and
protects itself, producing its own skin over time.
At Alto, bronze — a material historically associated with bells, ancient
sculpture, and marine chronometers — is patinated and then stabilized through
an original process that captures the exact moment of color and depth,
without the artificial gloss of varnish.
One is a monument inscribed in climate; the other, an intimate object inscribed
in daily gesture.
In both, time acts — meteorological time there, lived time here.
Only ten pieces will be produced, each crafted and validated with the artist.
Their rarity stems from the extreme precision required in mastering both
material and detail — the only way to faithfully embody the project’s original
rigor.
On the wrist, the patinated bronze — through its specific composition, patina,
and stabilization — emerges as a paradoxical heir to Corten steel: nuanced and
profound.
Legibility remains strict — hands and markers reduced to the essential — so as
not to compete with the “sculptural dial.”
This passage from the monumental to the intimate does not translate
“identically”; it condenses, it transforms the medium.
Fidelity lies not in imitation, but in the equivalence of experience.
Then remains the question of Venet’s place in the history of art.
The major retrospectives (Lyon, Beijing), the Versailles invitation, Arc Majeur, the
Asian cycles, and the establishment of a landmark Foundation — all point to a
body of work defined by rare qualities: coherence, radicality, and public
resonance.
From The Pile of Coal to The Hypothesis of Gravity, from The Line to The Arc,
from The Angle to The Collapse, what is at stake is less a “style” than an
insistence — to make form a field of experimentation where the world itself,
with its laws and its accidents, is revealed.
There are many quotations, but perhaps this one best encapsulates his
ambition: “to push the limits” — not for the sake of superlatives, but to
expand, as he puts it, “the cultural space” — that is, quite concretely, what we
are able to see, to understand, and to carry within us.
The Foundation, finally, ensures that such a body of work will not close in on
itself. A place for sculpture and archives, but also for lending and dialogue, it
establishes a demanding genealogy — minimalism, conceptual art — of which
Venet has been as much an heir as one of its writers.
That an artist should remind us that works “belonging to history” should not
belong to a single individual, and should create an institution to let them live
on, is a way of completing the circle: the line returns to its point, yet the space
has expanded.
Within this perspective, the ALTO × BERNAR VENET collaboration stands as a
discreet but decisive milestone — proof that a vocabulary born from tar and
coal, forged in Corten steel and monumentality, can inhabit a minute volume
without losing any of its radicality or philosophy.
That an arc can collapse — without falling
from grace — onto a dial, and that this
collapse, each day, might set our gaze back to
work: that, perhaps, is the most beautiful
measure of time.
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