Interview with Vera Molnár

In the late 1990s, Vincent Baby began a long dialog with Vera Molnár. Here, he proposes a compilation of their exchanges that allows, first and foremost, for the artist to take a retrospective look at her practice while also providing anecdotes of her life and commenting on the critical reception of her works.

In this interview that is at once lively, funny and theoretical, we discover the mind of an artist who, at the age of sixteen, informed her mother of some big decisions: she would stop believing in God, going to church and playing the piano; she was going to paint and live in France. The artist tells the story of her life with her husband François Molnár, their collaboration between science and art and her involvement with the CRAV (the Centre de recherche d’art visuel, created in 1960) before working alone, resuming with irony and humour her practice as being at the crossroads of the “three cons”: the concrete (or construct), the conceptual and the computer. A pioneer of computer art, Vera Molnár explored in turns mathematical laws, an imaginary machine (a computer before the computer) and then the computer itself.

The story is punctuated by several previously unpublished texts by the artist, who places us at the heart of her practice by commenting on several of her most important series. Readers are invited to grasp the richness of a work intimately linked with the elaboration of programmes, an experimental practice proceeding by trial and error.