Pistoia celebrates French conceptual artist Daniel Buren with the retrospective “Fare Disfare Rifare” (March 8 to July 27 2025), essentially to make, unmake and remake. The artist, who has been proposing the same colourful stripes since the 1960s, always works on-site for exhibitions and installations, and he provides the title of his shows as part of the process of making. The chosen title, he explained to the press, was a second choice: one that played on the French word “jouer” – to play – might have even better reflected the artist’s way of “playing” with art and space, but proved difficult to translate into Italian.
It’s been a hot minute since I’ve visited the Tuscan town of Pistoia, and I’d say that this show might be a good opportunity to take a day trip and visit, or revisit, the city’s Romanesque monuments, whose dark green (almost black!) and white stripes dialogue harmoniously with Buren’s work. The show is part of a series spotlighting contemporary artists who have already worked in the area, and Buren has left quite a mark on Tuscany in the past twenty years: Muri Fontane a tre colori per un esagono (2005-2011) in the park of Villa La Magia outside Quarrata, public works at the Ospedale di Pistoia ex Ceppo (2005) and La Cabane Éclatée aux Quatre Salles (2005) in the Collezione Gori – Fattoria di Celle at Santomato. More recently, Buren also intervened at Fiesole’s Belmond Villa San Michele (currently closed for renovation). Some of these locations will be object of extra openings and guided tours for the occasion.
Buren’s art is like a jam session with itself. It’s art for art’s sake, purposefully without meaning, but the art – and the space – changes in each site-specific location. Early in his career, Buren began working almost exclusively with 8.7 cm-wide black and white stripes, an idea that began when he got some cotton canvas with these stripes at a market where he was working in the Virgin Islands. Initially, his placement of the stripes was disruptive. In Paris’s Palais Royal, the inner courtyard was adorned in 1985 by a series of truncated black and white columns that had a practical function related to the construction of an underground parking lot, and that were intended to force viewers to look at this space in a different way. It was part of the then culture ministry’s desire to make art less dusty and hail in an era of greater cultural accessibility. A lot of people hated what came to be called “Buren’s columns”, arguing that they were inappropriate to the historic location. This is always an interesting argument and one that comes up regularly in cities with extensive historical monuments like Florence. The columns remained, in disrepair, prompting the artist to complain to the French government.
Buren says that Tuscany did not call him, he was called to Tuscany. Perhaps he was drawn to the striped Medieval architecture that you certainly see in Pistoia as well as in Prato and Lucca that alternates the dark green “Marmo di Prato” or Serpentine with white Carrara marble. On the occasion of this retrospective exhibition, Buren has installed striped drapes in the windows of the Palazzo dei Vescovi next to the town’s Duomo, the most significant piazza in Pistoia. Is it controversial or offensive? Not in the slightest. In fact, it’s perfectly integrated. Meant to provide a dynamic element that contrasts the facades of the Duomo and Baptistery – the curtains are activated by fans – the work seems perfectly integrated into the space. Is it that what was controversial 40 years ago is no longer so, or is it that Pistoia is really the right place for Buren’s stripes?
The show’s title, about making, unmaking and remaking, reveals an awareness that installations are for the most part temporary, and that he will always be taking things down but rethinking them and remaking them in a new space. The work in the courtyard, Découpé/Etiré, is a revisitation of a 1985 installation in Turin. Originally in a square space, the courtyard in Palazzo Buontalenti is rectangular, requiring him to, as the work’s title says, cut and stretch the previous version. The result, with four colours in four quadrants, is a prospective game that Buren says is a “totally new work and the greatest example of change in my work to date.”
The exhibition features some early works on canvas dating to the mid 1960s, nice, colourful abstract works that pre-date his conceptualist phase. I think they are a surprising addition to our understanding of the artist, showing a command of technique and a sensitivity towards colour and shape that his limitation to stripes cannot demonstrate.
Buren’s art is immersive, in that you’re allowed to walk through it and see how the space affects you. For example, there is an orange room with a plexiglass maze and striped top that is entirely disorienting. A room with a forest of lumber topped with a harlequin’s ceiling is another experience. Personally, I’m not a fan of the way that a lot of contemporary art speaks about art being in the eye of the beholder – something Jeff Koons stole from Marcel Duchamp. Shiny mirrors that reflect back on you and beg a selfie are not my thing and they dominate a lot of crowd-pleasing, Instagrammable shows. Buren’s art “for art’s sake” creates a space to be experienced, but not interpreted. It’s pattern and colour that forces you to look and think, but not to look for meaning per se.
Visitor information
DANIEL BUREN. Fare, Disfare, Rifare.
Lavori in situ e situati 1968-2025
Pistoia, Palazzo Buontalenti (via de’ Rossi 7)
8 March – 27 July 2025
Open Wednesday through Sunday, 10am to 7pm. €10.
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