Daniel Buren

A flag fluttering atop the central dome of the Grand Palais, with a large blue circle emblazoned over a field of stripes, is the only hint that Daniel Buren is the current creator of Monumenta. Here, he presents a considerably different turn from his predecessors: Instead of a large or ponderous installation, colored circles float joyfully on black and white stilts (subtle stripes) across the nineteenth-century exhibition hall—a jolly forest of human scale. With tinted film in green, blue, yellow, and orange stuck on this low, flat, transparent canopy, it creates a colored lens through which to gaze up at the palatial dome that has, as in his 2005 Guggenheim intervention, been transformed into a blue checkerboard.

Over the past decades Buren has taken the paint out of painting, yet color and composition (to a point) are still key attributes of his practice. By incorporating pattern and architecture into his work, he diffuses his site of operations, expanding the boundaries of how viewers can engage with art. Now in taking on the Grand Palais, Excentrique(s), Work in situ, 2012, offers another kind of diffusing and expansion: it is a work but also a space.

With a specific entrance and exit requiring that visitors promenade the length of the space, through the quasi-tropical light into a clear central area with mirrored platforms from which to view the dome, the Frenchman has effectively created a space within a space. When the sun shines, Technicolor circles are refracted on the floor, and in the evenings roving spotlights create a nightclub-y feel. Events and projects will be programmed here during the course of the exhibition, thus extending Buren’s interaction between art and life to include other artforms and artists.