Daniel Buren: Excentrique(s)

The beauty and effectiveness of Daniel Buren's visual grammar has a very popular charm; it is wonderfully intuitive, often moving beyond the initial layer of understanding. The French artist's signature-motifs are a series of obsessively repeated vertical stripes of equal width, and above all the parameters of his minimalist aesthetic, which have become a powerful conceptual tool since the sixties, and have programmatically imbued his visual and textual production. With great consistency, Buren has used this simplification and applied it to a large number of site-specific works that have made history. His work's intrinsic qualities — conceptual and spatial — re-wrote proportions and spatial use. Described as "decorative," Buren's work nevertheless associates a positive connotation with the adjective. "Art has never ceased being concerned with decoration," he has said.

First in fabric and then in different industrial products, his stripes have materialized in a large number of colours and materials — glass, stone, etc. — abandoning the terrain of pure statement for an approach that seeks to redefine public or private space.

In Buren's monumental new installation on show in Paris, this extremely rigorous exercise is softened by the Grand Palais' grandiose dimension. The installation occupies the large central nave and begins to reveal many and evident signs of fatigue. The economy of means, with its numerical formula, becomes sterile and even the reflection (the mirrored reflection of space) becomes an oversimplified visual device. Here the catalogue, or rather the palette, of all the operations with which he has transformed and redesigned other spaces with unquestionable success, do not stage that same prodigious mise en abîme.

It is not only that this space has become culturally difficult, but it is also that the events-based logic has been stratified for over a century in this mastodon located in the heart of the city. The Grand Palais was born as a temple and storage space for the religion of progress, and what Daniel Buren is trying to do in this building is almost too philosophically sophisticated. The real success of Buren's process-oriented work is that it makes boundaries disappear. Even the rhetoric of an event like Monumenta, now in its fifth edition and in the unconscious banality of this exhibit, is now revealed as a vast and empty archaeological park, where the public and artist-dinosaurs risk to miss one another.

All the masters of genre have been ruined by this large-scale exercise in style: Anselm Kiefer's poem had to invent a proto-architecture container, Richard Serra found illusionist means, and Christian Boltansky had to endow his work with accessibility and pleasure. A much more complicated and less digestible artist like Anish Kapoor has clearly focused on the viewer's ingestion. Now Daniel Buren, aware of the trap, has made the most of his splendid and enjoyable site-specific installation. An example is located in the court of honour of the Palais Royal in Paris, choosing direct confrontation with the place's iconic qualities. In equally difficult spaces, Buren has recovered the radicalism of his proposals, for instance in his dialogue with the aggressive modernist ramp at the Guggenheim in New York in the '70s, with a piece that was later withdrawn.

In this opus, which unfolds over 3,000 square metres in an attempt to erase the space's monumentality, Buren has scattered about aediculae, crowned with circles of colour: reminiscences of cabane éclatées in four precise colours, those of industrial Jell-O. The vertical structures mimic the size and proportions of Buren's stripes, and seek to find the horizontality of this cathedral-like volume, lowering it within a sea of tangential circles.

With his long-time collaborator Patrick Bouchain, Daniel Buren has designed a complex architectural device. An unexpected reduction of the Grand Palais' enormous expanse of glazing to a ceiling height of middle-class Haussman-era home. A sleight of hand, even if the space designed on paper has a different effect and does not correspond to its rhythm. The temptation of the large void is nullified to become an effect of colour distribution, almost like a Byzantine mosaic or an old Photoshop program. In an interview on the eve of the opening, Daniel Buren explained his reasons for not using the monumental entrance to the Grand Palais, "It's heavy, dark and bombastic; in two words, it is academic and pompier." He preferred the more discreet north entrance, which immerses the viewer directly in the sea created by the artist.

This comprehensive thinking about monumentality seeks a harmonious relationship with the physical and conceptual space, charged with a sonorous murmur in several languages, which laps the viewer like a wave. A longitudinal route is created — an archipelago of coloured sensations or a set of coloured islands. Depending on the light of the capricious Parisian spring, the perception of the space will change constantly. The sensation is that of an annoying pointillisme on a macroscopic scale, like moving over the surface of a Seurat painting with a magnifying glass. Like a boring Sunday afternoon promenade alongLa Grande Jatte.