The figure of Daniel Buren (Boulogne-Billancourt, 1938) emerges on the contemporary scene with an authority that transcends mere historical recognition to embody an artistic practice that continues to renew its language after more than fifty years of research. A key figure inconceptual art since the 1960s, from the outset he has set his practice as a continuous process of reconfiguring space through a language capable of combining in an architectural and immersive dimension a stringent logical and visual coherence with an inexhaustible generative potential. His approach is guided by an acute sensitivity to the constituent elements of urban, architectural and natural space, which are deciphered, reinterpreted and reworked by his intervention in a geometric key. Symmetries and oppositions, color alternations, the interplay between outside and inside, the relationship between natural and artificial light, transparency and reflection are the main conceptual materials with which the artist builds his works, always conceived as a visual continuum with respect to the environment that welcomes them. The geometric elements projected or superimposed on the walls of interiors or exteriors are transformed, therefore, into imaginary doors or windows that open unprecedented visions of the architectural space, or into diaphragms that segment that same space in an illusionistic way, overwriting it to the point of distorting its connotations. The use of water and mirrors, introduced into his expressive vocabulary in the early 1970s, also play a significant role in amplifying this transformative dimension, generating further multiplications of perspectives that destabilize the gaze by proposing, depending on the point of view, different facets of a space approached as malleable matter.
Over the course of six decades, Buren has consolidated a visual repertoire that is apparently limited but of extraordinary versatility, rooting his practice in the use of a perceptual device that later became his stylistic signature: the pattern of alternating white and colored vertical stripes, always exactly 8.7 centimeters wide, derived from an industrial fabric that Buren discovered by chance in a Parisian market in 1965. What constituted a veritable “epiphany” for the artist (which was followed, in 1967, by his definitive abandonment of the studio in favor of environmental interventions, afferent at the same time to painting, sculpture and architecture) represents not so much a distinctive mark as a methodological tool (in his words outil visuel), which allows him to interrogate the conditions of visibility and existence of the work of art. This visual device of rigorous simplicity, at first adopted as the extreme landing place of a research on the degree zero of painting, later became the vehicle through which the artist directs the viewer’s attention from the work itself to the entire physical and social environment in which it is embedded. In such a shift and in the effectiveness of his installations in revealing unseen aspects of the spaces in which they are placed, the political dimension underlying the entire oeuvre of Buren, who has stated on several occasions that “art is always highly political, even when you don’t see it.” His interventions in public space, in fact, do not aim to convey explicit messages, but to reconfigure the perception and experience of places, inviting the viewer to a critical awareness of his or her relationship with the surrounding environment. Exemplary testimony to the subversive potential of this “interventionist” art with respect to reality and far from being entrenched behind conceptual canons usually associated with geometric abstractionism is the controversy stirred up in 1986 by the installation in the courtyard of honor of Palais-Royal in Paris of Les Deux Plateaux. The work, composed of 260 octagonal columns with black and white vertical stripes, identical except for their height, now one of the most iconic monuments in the French capital, before being recognized as a masterpiece of public art risked dismantling because of its heretical character with respect to established urban planning conventions, only to be ultimately rehabilitated by virtue of the approval shown by the citizens, who immediately began to inhabit that previously ignored site.
If it is clear from these premises that Buren, once he had fine-tuned the focus of his research, was no longer interested in the creation of autonomous objects but in the production of experiences, it seems equally obvious that synthesizing his creative universe in an exhibition that contemplates both diachronic and contextual aspects represents no small challenge. And it is precisely to this challenge that Fondazione Pistoia Musei responds with the exhibition DANIEL BUREN. Making, Unmaking, Remaking. Works in situ and situated 1968-2025, set up at Palazzo Buontalenti in Pistoia and co-curated by the artist himself and Monica Preti, director of the foundation. The exhibition itinerary, articulated in the rooms of the 16th-century palace, in the central courtyard and in two site-specific interventions in the city, through a close dialogue between historical works and recent works, many of which were created or recreated for the occasion, aims to retrace the artist’s career and projects. The intent of the exhibition is to document his ability to radically transform places without prevaricating them and to investigate his privileged relationship with Tuscany, a region that boasts a significant number of his permanent works.
The title of the exhibition locates the essence of Buren’s approach in the intersection between the gesture of making, the gesture of unmaking and the gesture of remaking, a consequence of his systematic questioning of the work’s indissoluble union with space through a process that is always in progress, in which the artist’s action is ceaselessly renewed by the viewer’s gaze, which is also in symbiosis with the environment. The works in the exhibition, and more generally the artist’s entire production, are divided (according to his own definition) into two types: works in situ, that is, made in streets, galleries, museums, landscapes and buildings, based on the context and not transferable elsewhere, and situated works, ideally transportable to other places. In both cases, however, the work is never a self-sufficient object, but exists only in its relationship to the outside world. In an interesting conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist for Art Basel 2021, Buren elaborated on the first notion, which he developed by reflecting on certain particular frame-like elements that in Japanese gardens scenographically frame portions of the landscape, designated in the local language as “instruments borrowing the landscape.” A similar intuition underlies the concept of the artist’s in situ works, which do not seek to appropriate space by forcing it in an authoritarian way, but only to borrow it by incorporating it into a work that is impossible to embrace with a single glance, where each of the different possible visual angles is part of a larger composition. Following the same suggestion, the exhibition at Palazzo Buontalenti, past the first rooms devoted to the older paintings (essential for understanding the genesis of his language), can also be considered a kind of articulated work in situ, where the artist’s direction in orchestrating, camouflaging, reinterpreting or reinterpreting spaces according to their architectural characteristics is evident.
The incipit of the exhibition is dedicated, therefore, to the pictorial research of the mid-1960s, represented by a selection of large paintings on cotton canvas and collages in which the artist, having abandoned figurative art practiced previously altogether, sought increasingly essential combinations of forms. Some of the works are made using sheets, on which striped motifs appear applied to the bottom with tape, an anticipation of the choice of vertically striped industrial fabrics that would appear shortly thereafter. These early proofs are exciting in revealing the artist’s tension between the aspiration for geometric purity (already preponderant) and the organic heritage of his painting, detectable in the glazes made imperfect by drippings and surface irregularities, in the chromatic intonations of an organic matrix and in the predominance of the curved form. In the next room the relationship is reversed: his unmistakable striped pattern begins to dominate, at times overlaid or interrupted by fluid forms that act as a harmonious counterpoint to the rigorous orthogonality of the pattern.
It continues with an enveloping room, in which the walls of the room are bathed in soft light leaking from two striped fabrics made translucent by the lighting behind, one neutral-toned, the other orange-dominant. This installation perfectly exemplifies how Buren uses light as a sculptural material capable of creating environments that engage the viewer in a totalizing sensory experience. We then move on to the inner courtyard of Palazzo Buontalenti, enlivened by two portico loggia systems with a double order of columns of decreasing diameter. Here finds its place one of the most significant works in the exhibition, Découpé / Étiré (1985-2025), born from the rethinking of a work made for the Tucci Russo gallery. It is a structure that expands accordion-like in space like a perspective game, composed of a series of porticoes that fit into each other, from the largest to the smallest, with some profiles covered with mirrored surfaces. The installation is emblematic of an approach to art that makes modularity and recontextualization its operating principles: once cut into pieces, the theoretical single plane formed by the series of porches can unfold and extend into countless variations, in a potentially infinite process of recombination. The itinerary continues with a room devoted to the artist’s numerous design drawings for public works carried out in Italy (many of them in Tuscany), such as La Cabane èclatée aux quatre salles (2005) in the Fattoria di Celle park, the Hemodialysis Pavilion of Pistoia Hospital, Concave / Convexe: deaux places en une avec fontaine (2011) in Piazza Arnolfo in Colle di Val d’Elsa and Muri Fontane a tre colori per un esagono at Villa Medicea La Magia in Quarrata. We then come to one of the exhibition’s most spectacular installations, Harlequin to Infinity (2003-2025), an immersive environment made of wooden columns topped by a ceiling of differently colored square panels, from whose transparency the pattern of stripes can be glimpsed as a subtrack. In this ordered labyrinth of vertical structures, multiplied by the insertion of mirrors, light filters from above expanding into the space below and creating an evocative and disorienting kaleidoscopic effect.
In this dialectic between the static nature of a form standardized by the geometric layout and the dynamism triggered by light, what we might call the artist’s strategy of perceptual subversion is realized, where the apparent simplicity of the apparatus succeeds in catalyzing a complex reorganization of the gaze. The visit concludes with a room devoted to three high-reliefs from the series Prismes et miroirs (2022), compositions of angular panels projecting from mirrored backgrounds punctuated by stripes, respectively black, pink and blue alternating with the canonical white. The overall effect is that of a dynamic space that seems to bend and stretch, inviting the viewer to move around the room to experience the different perspectives and changing relationships among the colors, shapes, and reflections in the mirrors.
This relational conception of the artwork finds its most accomplished expression in interventions outside the museum perimeter, such as the Facade to the Winds (2025), an in situ work created on the facade of the Old Palace of the Bishops in Piazza del Duomo, where the vertical black and white bands printed on the window screens dialogue with the horizontal Romanesque bichromatic marble stripes of the adjacent Cathedral and Baptistery. Equally significant in its minimalism is the intervention Dalla terrazza alla strada: livello (1979-2025), a strip of black and white paper bands that, adapting to the wall between Palazzo de’ Rossi and the Sdrucciolo del Castellare, interacts with urban geometries evoking the Affichages sauvages made by the artist in the streets of Paris in the late 1960s. The work recalls that radical critique of art institutions that characterized Buren’s early days, when the abandonment of the studio in favor of direct intervention in public space represented a political as well as aesthetic stance. As in those performative actions, here too the device of the stripes, far from being the mere repetition of a pattern, reveals itself as a generative mechanism capable of adapting to and dialoguing with any context: not, therefore, a sign imposed on the space, but an element that reveals its intrinsic characteristics, incorporating them into the artistic vision.
What emerges strongly from the entire exhibition is the coherence of the artist’s modus operandi, concretized in an evolving and adaptive system that, even in the stringent consistency of method, always manages to modify itself according to environmental specificities. His works, rather than posing as authoritarian impositions, offer themselves as proposals for the reinterpretation of spaces that invite the visitor to actively participate in the process of re-signification. The visual homogeneity of the timeless vertical bands thus constitutes the prerequisite for bringing out the heterogeneity of contexts, in a process of detecting what would otherwise remain invisible. In light of these considerations, the Pistoia exhibition is configured not so much as a traditional retrospective, but as an opportunity to rethink the French artist’s entire career through the lens of the present. The successful encounter between historical and recent works, situated and in situ works, interior and exterior of the museum in a single habitable abstract world triggers a game of cross-references that transcends chronology to propose a synchronic reading of the practice of an artist whose research continues to be an indispensable reference point for reflecting on the relationship between art, architecture and public space.
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