Daniel Buren, Photo Souvenir, Palazzo Senza Tempo, 2021
Daniel Buren (Boulogne-Billancourt, 1938) has interacted with a new construction built by Mario Cucinella in Peccioli. Buren’s work, a work in situ entitled Photo-souvenirs at 45°, 5 colors + black and white, is focused on a large wall, measuring 9m by 8m, placed under a panoramic deck.
Buren’s work is composed of a series of colored lozenges in apricot, purple, pink, green and blue, demarcated by thin stripes that run diagonally in relation to the wall. Vertical black and white stripes are inside them. The final effect is particularly dynamic. Since the wall is located in a position visible from one of the main entrances into the historic center of Peccioli, the work is a powerful attraction for the gaze of those who find themselves walking in that stretch of the street.
The suspended deck of Palazzo Senza Tempo and Buren’s wall integrate and interpenetrate one another in a dialectical way, mutually enhancing their innovative charge.
For Buren, painting is no longer understood as something that represents reality but it becomes reality itself. As a consequence, its purpose is no longer to reproduce what one is surrounded by in an illusory way or to be the expression of the artist’s spiritual interiority. Instead, it takes on a value in itself. In Buren’s vision, the environmental context is no longer a secondary and passive subject but it takes on a function within the aesthetic language, which in turn determines a transformation of the surrounding landscape.
Bibliography
Daniel Buren, edited by Antonella Soldaini, Municipality of Peccioli, 2021