“I never fantasize about a place, even if it was the most beautiful” – L’Express

L’Express: If, at 17, you had not won a high school scholarship, which notably allowed you to go to Mexico, would your path have been different? Would you have even become an artist?

Daniel Buren: Impossible to say, obviously, but it gave substance to things that I was already very interested in. Very young, I wrote, I drew, I loved cinema, I even thought of making it my career. In the summer of 1955, I first left for Provence on my moped, the 200 old francs from this Zellidja grant in my pocket, to carry out a study on the influence of landscape in painting, from Cézanne to Picasso. In Arles, I came across the Minelli shoot, The Passionate Life of Vincent Van Gogh, and I rendered some services there, for three sous. I wandered around here and there, I didn’t know anyone, but, one thing led to another, I met a lot of artists, some unknown, and others more prominent, like André Masson. Collectors too, like Douglas Cooper and John Richardson who welcomed me into their home, at the Château de Castille, a sumptuous bastide filled with works of art from the 20th century, including a beautiful Circus by Fernand Léger that I still see .

It is also thanks to them that you approached Picasso…

He was known to be unapproachable. I didn’t even know where he lived; no one wanted to tell me, for fear of incurring his wrath. Cooper and Richardson, who were close friends of his, finally gave me the precious address. I rushed to Cannes and waited in front of La Californie. Picasso ended up noticing me and, unexpectedly, invited me to the Victorine studios, where he was shooting, in a small group, his film with Clouzot. I spent three days there, I watched him work, it was incredible!

The following summer, with a new grant, I went to Mexico to meet mural painters. This movement born from the Mexican Revolution captivated me because it constituted the only experience of this first half of the 20th century to restore the spotlight on frescoes and monumental work that had not been known in Europe since the Renaissance. For me, the Paris School, which dominated the artistic sphere in our latitudes, was the enemy to be defeated, and it was interesting to have another side of the story.

So you built your work against this School of Paris deemed too academic?

During that summer of 1956, I crossed Western Canada and the United States, and I saw what was being done there. The French cultural intelligentsia still considered the Parisian sphere as the center of the artistic world. There was a blatant contradiction between what was being done on both sides of the Atlantic, and Paris was absent. My antinomy on the production of works is set against this context. I then understood that if we knew little about Mexican fresco artists, it was because their monumental works could not be moved, unlike easel paintings which can be exchanged and sold. In this critical dynamic, four artists were formed into an association: Buren, Mosset, Toroni, Parmentier, which constituted what was subsequently called a pre-68 movement, with pamphlets and anti-saloon proposals: a way of rebelling against the fact that at the time, in the capital, to show one’s work, one had to go through these obsolete salons dating from the 19th century.

You don’t have a workshop. The guiding principle of your work is first and foremost the place, the artist’s ability to react to a place, whatever it may be?

In 1967, I abandoned the idea of ​​a workshop for economic reasons, which forced me to work differently. Still unknown, I only had the street to work on, on the walls, at a time when graffiti did not yet exist, and very quickly I realized that it was a game changer. The workshop then appeared to me to be a sort of habit and a source of hindrance, because it implies a proximity and almost an anxiety with what we are going to create. From there, I focused my work on the place whatever it may be, interior or exterior, institutional or not, which became what has interested me the most until today.

Since your beginnings, you have infinitely declined your alternately white and colored strips measuring 8.7 centimeters wide. Does this recurring motif arise from implacable logic?

At the end of the 1960s, I was already being questioned about the recurrence of my scratches and I did not know at the time whether or not they would persist in my work. But the fact that this recurrence seemed to disturb some people made it paradoxically more interesting to me, a reason that had to be explored since it was disturbing. Sixty years later, the tapes are still there, and I know today, after having looked at many things, that there is no reason why I should not work with this visual tool in my future projects which whatever they are. Yes, there is logic. This sign makes it possible to link all the work done to date; it is a reading tool.

At the center of your work is color, which you say is “pure thought”. What do you mean ?

Intuitively, I have always been interested in color, because it is intrinsic to art and opens up unlimited issues. We cannot talk about it because it is a form of thought in itself. We cannot define it because, like music, it does this work itself, without using written or spoken language. In the visual arts, if there is an element that has nothing to do with anything other than itself, it is first and foremost color. And to push it a little further, I don’t think there’s much to say about a painting that can be fully described in words. This is also why my work does not tell a story.

At the Mennour gallery, you arrange your alternating strips frontally, playing with the reflection of the mirror. Not to mention a story, what is the meaning of it?

The title, Folds against plane, says part of it. It is folded aluminum, which gives relief, hence their name high reliefs. The mirror, which I have used for a long time, allows you to disrupt what you have in front of your eyes and poses certain problems, starting with the place in which the pieces are located. I call this “situated works” because they are, unlike my projects in situ, moveable to another room, another city, another country. But, whatever the location, the mirror element incorporates foreign components into the work. And for me, it is this whole which is the work, the one which, through the artifice of the mirror, forever escapes the possibility of being stabilized.

So the location takes precedence over the autonomy of the work?

The great fundamental characteristic of painting, of sculpture, of the Western art object, is its autonomy, and one of the particularities of my work is that it is never autonomous. When I started, this question of autonomy was hyper critical, because I noticed, in the history of Western art, a desire for the work to become more and more autonomous, to the point of becoming an object of exchange above all, infinitely manipulable. We went from large historical and religious paintings to easel paintings which have become the most commercial object in the world, canvases that we can take under our arm, put wherever we want, as we want and make them say what we want. that we want.

How would you define your work? in situworks by nature “unsaleable” since they are linked to a specific environment?

Seen from this angle, they are indeed unsaleable, but, at the same time, they have created another situation, invented a space which was not used. Moreover, Renaissance painting and frescoes were already artists who worked on space, even if we didn’t talk about work. in situ. The term, that said, existed long before me in other fields such as architecture, and let’s say that, without knowing it, I introduced it into the world of art. For me, it means work done on site, seen on site, destroyed on site when it is an ephemeral work, and this idea of ​​the place or the site is the people who live there, those who make it possible. , architecture. There is also the question of adaptation: if I put columns at the Palais Royal, it is because it was the only place in Paris where there were columns everywhere. You take from the place what it gives you.

You often say that the history of these famous columns was a paradox from start to finish…

Yes, a succession of paradoxes! It had barely left my head when this work was refused by official authorities, starting with the Historical Monuments who unanimously rejected it. And then the Minister of Culture at the time, Jack Lang, – which had almost never happened – used his right to override the decisions of the various committees. Until its opening to the public, this 3,000 square meter work sparked an immense wave of criticism. When there was a change of government, the court of honor came close to destruction. But when the public discovered it, they took possession of it and the controversy died down almost instantly. Final paradox: the same authority which had refused the project altogether has registered this work as a Historic Monument, which protects it against any desire for destruction or even replacement!

At 85 years old and with more than 3,000 exhibitions under your belt, what still makes you dream?

My works are constructed in response to an invitation. The desire comes from the moment I am asked for this or that project. I never fantasize about a place, even the most beautiful, or about the most interesting museum in the world. I am not at all in the process of Christo, for example, who fought, sometimes for years, before obtaining even the authorization to intervene artistically on a public monument or on a place savage. What still makes me dream today is doing things that I didn’t even have the idea of ​​before they were offered to me.

* Galleria Minini, Brescia, Italy, until November 15; Mennour gallery, Paris, until November 25; Liège station, Belgium, until June 2024; Mac Val, Vitry-sur-Seine, until September 22, 2024.