As well as occupying the galleries inside Palazzo Buontalenti in Pistoia with his extensive one-man exhibition, French artist Daniel Buren is also showing on the outside of the elegant Renaissance building. Stretching along an exterior wall is a narrow band of alternating white and black squares.
Its title is a succinct self-description: “Dalla terrazza alla strada: livello”. Specifically sited in this location by the artist, the mural sets off dynamic visual perspectives in the perceptions of the passerby walking past the wall where via del Carmine and via de’ Rossi cross among the narrow historic streets of the city’s centre.
Buren’s work is as often encountered on the outside of buildings as it is in their interiors. His interventions are not just visually stimulating and unexpected; they are also thought-provoking and questioning. And this artist is identified by his exclusive use of one form: vertical bands, each 8.7 centimetres wide, which are alternately white and coloured. Introduced almost 60 years ago, the format is not a personal mannerism that has got out of hand. As Buren himself has said, it is more “a repetition of differences with a view to the same thing.” For he belongs to the radical generation of artists whose careers emerged in the 1960s. A decade when traditions were examined and challenged, many artists broke with their artform’s relationship to the marketplace and traditional institutions. They became a vibrant part of the political and social activism of the era.
Buren became a leading figure in a development that regarded artistic institutions as places of cultural confinement. Their response was not simply to make their projects in other spaces, like piazze and housing estates where new audiences would see them. Although new places for art were part of their strategy, it was not the full story. Their work refused to be neutral about the politics of ownership, value and display. Instead, their position was critical of those institutions, confronting their power over how we perceive art itself.
Buren placed his work outside that frame of reference; indeed, outside the frame itself. The reason why this exhibition has a single common feature, a proliferation of vertical stripes in numerous formulations and on a variety of scales, is that Buren devised a method devoid of personal style and illusion. Instead, his interventions are chosen to highlight the architectural structures and institutional circumstances of the settings where they appear. Thus, some are inseparable from a specific space; they are called “in situ”. Others can be adapted and reinstalled in different locations, with subtle changes based on each new context, and these Buren calls “situated works”. The Pistoia show has major examples of both.
Next door to the Duomo is the Antico Palazzo dei Vescovi, the medieval symbol of the bishop’s power in the city. It initially had the appearance of a fortified residence before becoming an aristocratic home in the 12th century. In the arcaded open loggia of the piano nobile, Buren has created La Facciata ai Venti. Time is at play here. Lengths of black and white striped fabrics hang from the arches, rippling with the wind (with some help from hidden fans). They belong to the present. Yet bands in the tapestries appear in dialogue with horizontal visual rhythms in the stone facades of the nearby Romanesque Duomo and Baptistery. The piazza is home to representatives of commune, state, commerce and the church. Buren seems to set it in motion, visually and conceptually. He draws attention to his installation as much as to the ancient buildings, and the part taken by their creators in the city’s history and changing vicissitudes.
Buren’s compositions deal with the relationship between human beings and their physical surroundings. That is not an easy subject, and controversy has often followed his actions. He was prosecuted by the Swiss police in 1969 for illicitly pasting his white and coloured striped paper signs throughout Bern and famously had a huge striped banner removed from the atrium of New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1971 after protests from other exhibitors. The so-called Colonnes de Buren, the in-situ project erected in the main courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris, continue to stoke vehement argument almost 40 years later. Octagonal columns are arranged in the form of a conceptual grid. Banded with white and black marble, their straight-line symmetry and varying heights suggest a rational new city rising from the bowels of Paris.
Buren’s career began with painting. In September 1965, visiting a Paris market to buy canvas, he noticed a fabric with vertical bands meant for striped awnings. Government buildings used the design extensively. Buren decided to appropriate it as the surface for his own paintings, making the readymade pattern the ground for increasingly geometric abstract images. As this exhibition reveals, the printed stripe soon supplanted painting. Buren stripped the artform back to its zero point, making the stripe a “visual tool” to highlight the characteristics of wherever it was placed. Yet, by reducing painting he also seems to have extended it, which is where his real importance lies. Boundaries are crossed so architecture merges with painting, which is positioned to align itself with sculpture by claiming its own semi-autonomous space. He never frames his canvases when exhibited indoors, presenting them in an unconventional way that defies expectations, emphasizing the museum environment itself.
Buren has demonstrated a deep affinity with Italy, first exhibiting in Milan in 1968. Numerous exhibitions have followed in major galleries throughout the country, especially in Turin, Rome and, in recent years, San Gimignano, where he works with Galleria Continua, a commercial gallery that has established a big presence in the town. The artist’s fascination with Tuscany has resulted in numerous site-specific works, such as Muri Fontane a tre colori per un esagono in the former Medici Villa La Magia near Pistoia and La Cabane Éclatée aux Quatre Salles at the Gori Collection in Santomato di Pistoia. The show alludes to many of these commissions with working drawings and documentation.
The French artist does not have a studio. He prefers to work on site, thinking through possibilities as he absorbs the unique features of the place. The viewer becomes conscious of his or her own presence within his work, which can rise to a scale where it immerses the imagination. Opening our eyes to how we see ourselves within the full dimension of our surroundings—visual, physical, theoretical and conceptual—is why Buren’s approach to art stays in the mind.
Daniel Buren. Fare Disfare Rifare: Lavori in situ e situati 1968-2025
Palazzo Buontalenti, Pistoia
Until July 27
