PARIS.- He has changed painting profoundly.

He has made the stripe a work of art.

He is famous all over the world for his site-specific installations that transform places and views.

After the exhibitions devoted to Michelangelo Pistoletto (2014) and Pascale Marthine Tayou (2015), the Galerie Aveline and Galleria Continua host works by the contemporary artist Daniel Buren from 10 October 2016 to 10 January 2017.

Juggling time and space, this is an innovative meeting of the artist’s most recent creation and his works from the beginning at the gallery of an avant-garde antique dealer. From this intimate dialogue between periods and centuries, a thrilling experience is born.

Outside, an installation: The Great Lozenge. Daniel Buren has taken over the entire facade of the 18th century building with black vertical stripes in the middle of which a large white lozenge is featured with windows coloured in blue, red, yellow... a mise en abîme of the Place Beauvau.

Inside, another discovery: works from the beginning created at the outset of Daniel Buren’s career when he was living in the Caribbean, and five paintings acquired by the antique dealer Jean-Marie Rossi during the 1960s.

From this encounter a feeling of obviousness is born: the permanence of the artist’s work over half a century and the vigour of the dialogue between arts through the ages.

In 1964, I worked in Paris and in 1965 I left for the U.S. Virgin Islands, an archipelago in the Caribbean. At the time I was painting large formats (about 200 x 200 cm) in a spirit of radical abstraction. All my works had stripes that I tried to make as regular as possible but which were not, because they were made entirely by hand. These paintings seemed overly rich to me so much so that I went in search of ways of reducing this exuberance.

During three weeks I spent in Paris in September 1965, I came across samples of cloth that seemed very interesting to me. I brought them back with me to the Caribbean and I began to apply paint directly onto the stripes instead of drawing them myself. I used different motifs and colours, but I still found them too rich. Among all these paintings, the ones that corresponded best to my expectations were the simplest and little by little I discovered interesting possibilities on which I started working (around October/November 1965). This cloth with coloured stripes against a white background, the most ordinary thing possible, has guided me and my work until today!

I kept the spacing between the stripes of this first cloth, 8.7cm (with a margin of 3 mm more or less, for example 8.5 cm minimum and 9 cm maximum) and the verticality of the “motif” (when applied to a vertical plane naturally). In other words, the 1966 painting is one of the very first on which we see the appearance of vertical stripes like those I still use today. But I consider these paintings to be my last “traditional” works, and my true break with traditional painting happened when I became aware that the place where the work is exhibited is as important as the work itself – an issue that seemed never to have been considered.

From then on (October 1967), all my work changed and I used the striped cloth, not as a support for a certain type of painting, but as a sign, a “visual tool”, allowing space to be revealed: the only invariable among hundreds of variable elements. Today, I still work with this “tool” that allows me to explore new paths, further away each time from the original striped cloth and from painting as the sole subject of inquiry. ----Daniel Buren