PARIS.- Daniel Buren’s new exhibition at Mennour, “Du cercle aux carrés, hauts-reliefs situés et in situ”, is based on colourful geometric combinations that evoke an immediate sense of visual and intellectual stimulation for the viewer.

Since his first personal exhibition at Mennour in 2007, which inaugurated the space at 47 rue Saint-André-des-Arts, Daniel Buren’s work has been the subject of solo shows in all four of the gallery’s spaces in Paris, and in art fairs throughout the world, including “C’était, c’est, ce sera, travaux situés”, “Quand les carrés font des cercles et des triangles : hauts-reliefs situés”, “Au fur et à mesure, travaux in situ et situés”, “Pyramidal, hauts-reliefs, travaux in situ et situés”, and “Plis contre plan, hauts-reliefs, travaux situés”. Like many of his other artworks, those exhibited here play with the presence of the viewer and initiate a rich dialogue with the site. Since the late 1960s, Daniel Buren has refused any system that would subordinate his works to a single point of view. Beginning with the principle that space, is in fact the ground, ‘the frame, [the] actual support in which the work inscribes—and constructs—itself’, [1] he reaffirms here that his productions ‘are not objects, but rather modulations of the space; they never exist for themselves alone’; [2] instead they are part of the place they appear in, both highlighting it and revealing it.

Consisting of high and low reliefs, this new group of artworks combines mirrors, colours (the different shades of which are chosen at random from an industrial palette), and Daniel Buren’s visual tool: alternating white and coloured 8.7-cm-wide vertical stripes. The primary quality of this tool is that of ‘being an invariable sign in the midst of millions of possible things that never stop varying’. [3]

Somewhere between flat and relief, painting and sculpture, each of the situated works in the series Du cercle aux carrés is a unique arrangement of brightly coloured solids placed in either a checkered or a cross pattern or in lines over an imaginary grid made up of evenly spaced squares on a circular, mirrored surface. The signature stripes appear on the prisms’ sides and are thus reflected.

This doubling is also at play in the in situ works in high and low relief that have been conceived in and for the last room. The room’s skylights bathe it in natural light that changes over the course of the day. In order to highlight or double this constant variation, Daniel Buren has installed on one side of the room a series of sharp-angled works that he has given the relatively enigmatic title Une fois j’te vois, une fois non, travail in situ [Now I See You Now I Don’t]. For this in situ work, the same prisms have been placed on top of one another until reaching the desired height. On the facing wall is a series of three-dimensional parallelepipeds in 2–3-mm-thick Dibond aluminum, a material that Daniel Buren has been using since it was invented.

Even though he doesn’t physically alter the architecture here, Daniel Buren constructs a powerfully poetic and sensory movement that is produced as the viewer moves around the space, with the reflective surfaces engendering an endlessly renewing series of perspectives and points of view. The works are thus constantly transforming, drawing into themselves both the surrounding space and the viewers’ bodies.


[1] Daniel Buren, « Fonction du musée » (1970), in Les Écrits 1965–2012, Volume 1, 1965–1995 (Paris: Flammarion/Cnap, 2013), p. 160

[2] Daniel Buren, « Vous êtes en face d’un récepteur... » (1975), ibid., p. 416.

[3] Daniel Buren, « Échanges avec Dominique Petitgand et Guillaume Désanges » (2006), in Les Écrits, Volume 2, 1996–2012, p. 1103