Daniel Buren, Les deux plateaux, 1985 - 1986, work in situ, public commission at the Cour d’Honneur, Palais-Royal, Paris. Courtesy Galeria Hilario Galguera.
Over the course of his career, Daniel Buren has developed a language of rigour and coherence by employing a grammar reduced to the essentials – the use of basic elements, simple materials, shapes, colours, and his signature 8.7 cm lines – to create “works in situ” that demonstrate his understanding of space and mastery in transforming it. Between the end of the 1960s and the early 1970s, he began his conceptual experimentation by reducing the visual element to a schematic and minimalist model. Finding inspiration in innovation, Buren avoids the limitations of a canvas, and his groundbreaking work ‘Les Deux Plateaux’ in the courtyard of Palais Royal Paris serves as an example of his research and investigation.
Using a pattern of contrasting stripes as a visual technique, the artist establishes “the line” as a visual instrument to reveal specific features and proportions of a site, and with the implementation mirrors in his recent practice, an additional dimension is added to reshape the space. Buren’s focus on the geometric figure, more specifically the cube, marks the difference in intervention between what he describes as “works in situ” and “situated works” – a subtle but crucial difference between the two.
Daniel Buren, The Boxes, situated works, 2022. Image Courtesy of Galeria Hilario Galguera.
Buren identifies “works in situ” interventions to indicate a work that is site- and time-specific that is unable to be relocated. Whereas “situated works” are site-specific works, inspired by the surroundings that are created with the purpose of installing and reinstalling in various locations to a changing set of rules that respond directly to the given space, which leads to subtle changes in the work.
“In my works, either if we talk about “situated works” or “works in situ”, their elements are absolutely specific of the place, in a way they are like an “imitation” of the place, for example, the columns at the Palais Royale, are taken directly from the size of the existing columns around the Palais Royale.”
Employing modular reflective surfaces that not only reflect but invite further reflection, Buren presents a thoughtful composition of coloured mirrors that alter our perception and surroundings, that changes how we navigate the space. As seen in Buren’s latest project, ‘The Coloured Mirrors, situated works, low reliefs‘ on display at Bortolami Gallery, showcase a series of new “situated works” composed of multi-coloured mirrors and painted MDF. Here, the artist alters the navigation of space, transforming lighting, restricting vistas, and opening up a universe of alternatives through endless possibilities of “reflection” while drawing attention to several architectural features of the gallery space, influencing the perspective and settings of the viewer’s surrounding environment.
Daniel Buren, The Boxes, situated works, 2022. Image Courtesy of Galeria Hilario Galguera.
His other most recent production ‘The Boxes, situated works, 2022′ at Galeria Hilario Galguera in Mexico City investigates and analyses his conceptual reflection since the 80s; the interplay between the architectural and spatial elements. These 25 “situated works” produced in Mexico and designed specifically for Galeria Hilario Galguera present colourful modular sculptures that extend over the interior walls of the gallery, almost transforming the gallery space into a modular chessboard capable of modifying the architectural space as a natural evolution rather than an intervention. Through this development, the environment is able to reflect the idea of “zero degrees” developed by the artist in relation to painting, which consists of the negation of the intervention itself (on canvas) as an object and its reduction to minimal components, colour and support that become part of the environment in a natural way.
“The fact that sometimes an element is part of a new ‘situation’, is also because these elements are more or less taking some aspects of the location, but that happens more with works ‘in situ’. When it’s very very specific […], it’s like a duplication or a multiplication of very specific elements of the place; it can be the material, the colour, can be material and colour, […] but it’s really inspired directly from the place, so what I will use is not automatically neutral, and is not neutral at all if you take it away, but when you see it in the context, “in situ”, it starts to be extremely neutral…”
This concept is, formally emphasised by the use and repetition of basic geometric forms and the combination of primary colours. Therefore, the artist’s proposal revolves around the inseparability between audience, site and art, or, subject-object-experience. Even when Buren’s works are not directly painted onto walls, the artist often makes use of translucent materials as a strategy to visually integrate the environment with the artwork, or vice versa. Since the space is in continuous transformation, the modular element also becomes here the real vertebra and central fulcrum of the entire exhibition conceptually, for a solution capable not only of transforming the space into a single dimension but hypothetically of moving with it in becoming a part of it.
“with the cubes or the boxes you can do anything, so I like very much this idea of working with a constant element to make works which are absolutely always different. […] and of course at some point for each work you have the stripes, which are always the same size, and then you have millions of possibilities with the colours and with an arrangement of the composition, of all these boxes on the wall. […] a very simple unique object.”
Daniel Buren, De un patio a otro Laberinto, trabajos in situ, 2014, Hospicio Cabañas, Guadalajara, Mexico. Courtesy Galeria Hilario Galguera
Notably, in 2014, Buren carried out one of the most significant interventions of his career at the Hospicio Cabañas in the city of Guadalajara, Jalisco at the initiative of Galeria Hilario Galguera. The neoclassical architectural configuration of the space, designed by Manuel Tolsá, constituted of aesthetic echos of André Le Nôtre, a French architect whose works have been an influence on Buren’s works. This, along with the presence of the most important murals of the Mexican muralist movement of José Clemente Orozco in the main chapel of the hospice, represented a conceptual reunion, resulting in his intervention of 19 patios of the building and the creation of a monumental mural in the Tolsá chapel of the same space, marking this as one of the most significant and emotional cycles in the course of Buren’s career – and testament to his ever-relevant, topical research over the decades that has been able to activate new, crucial themes of discussion in the global art scene.
Read more about Galería Hilario Galguera in Mexico city.