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Daniel Buren

09.26.08 - 10.19.08
Exhibition — théâtre Garonne | Scène européenne

Memory photo : Couleurs superposées, Acte II 60', work in situ, Museum La Forêt, 1982, Tokyo, detail — Rarely performed on stage since its creation in 1982, Couleurs superposées organizes the show of a painting.

© D.B-ADAGP 

The spectacle Couleurs superposées (overlaid coloursby Daniel Buren is being shown on Saturday 11 October 2008 at 8 pm.

Born in 1938 in Boulogne-Billancourt (France), he lives and works there.

 

He is one of the best-known contemporary artists, both in France and abroad, and one of the most productive, with more than 1600 exhibitions to his name since the mid-1960s. It is with the help of his main visual tool, his alternately white and coloured stripes, 8.7 cm/3.5 in wide, that this pastmaster of the in situ uses public places and museums in a way in which criticism of place is combined with its aesthetic revelation.

 

In the spectacle Overlaid Colours we see you having a painting made, live, by assistants. It's very close to the studio. On stage there's a large empty wall where you instruct five people to stick or tear off coloured strips of paper...

Yes, I'm there like a conductor conducting a piece of music which isn't written yet. It's like a ballet, and I improvise as things happen, with all the surprises that may come into play. But my point of departure is in no way the theatre, rather the “making” of painting: the spectacle of those amateur painters you sometimes see in the street. In the United States, there are even TV programmes where viewers are taught how to paint. As a general rule, this invariably involves painting a mountainscape with a lake! And you are witness to the gradual making of the picture. This is all that's worst as far as painting is concerned, but despite it there's still something fascinating about the way the picture is made. It's the fascination with this “making”, whether it's executed by a Sunday painter or by Picasso, that interests me. This has triggered in me this kind of performance. In those TV programmes, the end if always disastrous. When the person finishes the mountainscape, it's horrible. But throughout the time when you see him doing it, there's something fascinating about it. The problem is the result. So at the end of the Overlaid Colours spectacle, the stage goes dark, the work made on stage is destroyed, nothing is left. What matters here is solely the process, not its outcome.
(Les Inrockuptibles, special issue, “Vidéodanse 2008", Centre Pompidou).