Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Daniel Buren
French; 20th-century
Paris, France: Musée d’Art Moderne
87%
Wall of Paintings. 1966-77. Acrylic on 20 canvases
This piece is more deceptively painting than much else in modernism I can think of, even more deceptive than Mondrian or Newman (its clear predecessors) in the way it ekes effects of depth and differentiation out of an apparently rationalized, inexpressive compositional system. Buren's lines are all 8.7cm wide; the colored strips are painted, the uncolored bands between them are raw canvas — except for the white stripes closest to either edge of each picture, which are done in a loud acrylic white whose own edges, unlike those of the colored bands, are irregular because evidently painted freehand with a brush. Mostly these white lines are bracketed by one final set of color before the image ends, but in three instances they crop up at the outer limits of their pictures after a final set of uncolored segments, further disrupting the systematic canvas/color/canvas/color progression. And then lastly there's the specific placement of these paintings altogether on the wall — installation was an important element of Buren's practice — which is one more thorn in the side of standardization, since canvas-to-canvas the lines don't quite match up, turning the dull seriality into an almost ecstatic rhythm. Each of these infinitesimal shifts from rational order to (I'm exaggerating) almost romantic expressivity has the effect of taking the work out of the realm of Minimalism, from which it derives its lack of guile and its methodical approach, and placing it instead inside of the history of painting-proper. It's possible, in other words, to reproduce a Robert Barry or an Yves Klein and for your reproduction to be an object indistinguishable from the "original." Buren's mind, on the other hand, is somewhere inside of this arrangement, and its presence turns the colored bands into valleys and the raw ones into peaks — it makes you see this not as a geometrical proposition but as a living, because at its base unfixed and shifting, field of relations in both actual and illusionistic space. This is unthinkable without Minimalism, but not at all contained within its experiential limits. (TFS, 2026)