Venet at Piece Unique

The French Richard Serra (though Richard Serra is almost French himself), Bernar Venet is a bender, twister, ruster, toppler and stacker of enormous rails of steel. Best known for his monumental, rumpled spirals of continuous steel rails, square in section, he also has created, over the years, concatenations that look like a scatter of pick-up sticks composed of either identical straight or curved pieces of steel.

The railroad was first completed in France in 1855. Many of the original railway stations still exist in Paris, latticed pavillions of iron and glass. The Biblioteque Nationale by Henri Labrouste and of course the Eiffel Tower remind us of just how French were the early wonders of iron and steel. Serra, one feels, stands in the American tradition of industrial steelwork with its titanic arcs and warps and junctions; Venet stands no less in that of the French.

At Galerie Piece Unique in Paris.