Monumenta exhibitions have been organised by the ministry for culture since 2007, and every year they offer an internationally famous artist the opportunity to create a unique work under the 13,500 square metre nave, topped by a glass dome rising to a height of 45 metres.

After the French artist Christian Boltanski and the British artist of Indian origin Anish Kapoor, it is the turn of the creator of the famous “Colonnes de Buren” in the Palais Royal to take on this spectacular monument, with its refinement and soaring heights, built for the universal exhibition in 1900.

A new entrance

Monumenta is an event which offers one of the biggest places in the world to an artist to create an exhibition! It is “the beauty of this place”, more than its size, that is “the most difficult to deal with,” Daniel Buren told France Culture. To give a new perception of the space, he avoids the usual grand central entrance so that visitors do not immediately discover the “choir” of the Grand Palais. They go in through the least visible entrance, hidden behind trees, before making their way into a very long corridor, decorated with black and white stripes (which are the artist's calling card). The corridor acts as a telescope from which a square of lights with floating colours can be seen in the distance, which will gradually come into focus.

Colours in the air

A sort of forest of parasols appears, covered with different-sized coloured plastic circles in green, blue, yellow or orangey-red, positioned at a height of less than three metres. Their interplay with the light from the glass dome produces a surprising effect. Daniel Buren wants to “sculpt the air”, “capture light and give it a colour”. The brightness of this pool of colours changes with the weather. Look in front of you, and the architecture disappears into colours.

In the centre, under the glass dome latticed with blue, mirrors installed on the ground form a clearing, this time with an open, direct view of the roof of the Grand Palais, producing a breathtaking kaleidoscope effect. After leaving the sea of colours whose brightness depends on the changing effects of the Paris sky, during the day as well as the night (when a set of spotlights sweeps over the canvasses of colours), we find ourselves in the choir of Daniel Buren's vessel. “Buren's work reveals the grandeur of the place. The mirrors reflect back to its architecture,” emphasises the architect Patrick Bouchain who assisted Buren. “It is a tribute to geometry, to the metal structure.”