“I am not a painter”: an Interview with Daniel Buren

“Many painters, few geniouses” says Daniel Buren. His investigation began in the 1960s with the use of vertical stripes, each measuring 8.7 cm: interventions on fabric, glass, wood, flags

“Working in an Arizona desert or on the summit of a mountain doesn’t interest me. Art belongs where people live.”

Buren’s focus is on the relationship between an artwork and the environment that hosts it, which requires attention to the specifics of each space. For him, this means engaging with the city—or any inhabited, human space. “You can work in an open public square, in the secluded room of a museum, or in a private apartment,” he says. “Each space has its peculiarities. By playing with these, the artwork can highlight or critique certain elements or even turn them into hiding places. The possibilities are endless.”

Buren distinguishes his approach from that of Land Art, which often situates itself in remote, depopulated settings. “The city is full of human traces—this is what fascinates me,” he notes. “Working in the desert or on a mountain peak doesn’t. I want to create works where everyday life happens, where art can be encountered in a natural, integrated way. Even in rural areas, one sees fields, vineyards, and groves meticulously arranged by human labor. These traces of humanity provide a context for art to enter into dialogue.”

From Painting to Stripes: Fabric, Paper, Glass, Mirrors, Wood, Flags, and Banners

Since 1965, Daniel Buren’s work has centered on vertical stripes in alternating white and colored bands, always 8.7 cm wide. By limiting himself to this uniform, serialized pattern, Buren “empties” the painting of any traditional compositional subject. His interest lies in the conditions that allow painting to exist—its supports, its setting, and the ways in which it can engage viewers and surroundings.

“I did not invent the stripe, nor do I own it,” he says. “I only use it.” Over time, his artwork has inhabited printed textiles, cut paper, mirrors, flags, banners, and architectural structures, continually re-examining how art might occupy space and interact with its users.

Making Art Where Humanity Leaves Its Mark

“The study of space is a constant in my work,” Buren continues. “Every place—urban or otherwise—tells a story of human presence. I’m not interested in site-specificity for its own sake, but rather as a means to intensify or challenge an existing context. That can happen in a metropolis like Naples or New York, or it might happen in the countryside, provided the area is populated, cultivated, marked by people’s lives.”

A city, in his view, is “a depositary of humanity.” Likewise, certain rural landscapes can be so carefully shaped by agriculture that they, too, become extensions of collective labor. “Anywhere there’s a trace of people, I might find a reason for an intervention,” Buren says. “The only exceptions are uninhabited or uninhabitable zones. My work has no place in a desert—whether literal or metaphorical.”

The Occasion: Fare, Disfare, Rifare at Palazzo Buontalenti

The conversation arises in conjunction with Fare, Disfare, Rifare, Buren’s exhibition at Palazzo Buontalenti. Spanning works from 1968 to 2025, the show explores how he “makes, unmakes, and remakes” his own oeuvre. Historical pieces are placed alongside newly conceived or reconceived installations, all connected by his longstanding use of stripes and the principle of transforming architectural space.

Visitors encounter early pieces from the mid-1960s—collaged works on paper, large cotton-canvas paintings—revealing Buren’s shift toward abstraction through reduction and repetition. Over the decades, he has continued to revisit and reinterpret these foundational gestures. His method of “making, unmaking, remaking” constantly questions the status of the artwork. Does it remain fixed once created, or does it live through reinvention, dialogue with place, and shifts in medium?

For a Sustainable, Everyday Enjoyment of Art: Buren Against Tourist Destinations

Key to Buren’s practice is the notion that art should be woven into the daily fabric of social life. Placing artworks in remote or highly specialized locations, he argues, can reduce them to tourist curiosities—“gadget-culture,” as he once put it in a 1967 manifesto against the large salons in Paris. In that text, he critiqued how art, if confined to decorative or purely entertainment-based functions, drains public engagement of its critical potential.

“I prefer to create an environment that relates to the people who actually use a space,” he explains. “When you make people travel long distances just to see an artwork, you turn it into a place of pilgrimage. The artwork becomes a spectacle or an Instagram backdrop, losing any meaningful connection to everyday reality.”

The Exhibition Fare, Disfare, Rifare: Preparatory Drawings, Installations, and Video Experiments

Within the Palazzo’s rooms and courtyard, a series of works exemplify Buren’s exploration of how space can be activated. There are paintings on striped fabrics dating back to 1965 and 1966, “Cabanes” (cabin-like structures) reimagined from the 1980s and 2000s, and mixed-media reliefs that test the boundaries between two and three dimensions. A dedicated section presents Buren’s preparatory sketches for interventions in Italy—showing how, in practice, he tailors each piece to the specific qualities of its host site.

Experimental videos also feature prominently, highlighting how the alternating white and colored bands act as a “visual device.” In one video work titled From One Frame to Another: 5 Images / Fragments of a Model – Simultaneous Retransmission, Scale 1:1, Buren revisits a 1974 in situ project with updated filming technologies. These pieces reflect his abiding interest in how an image or object can be reframed, restaged, and renewed according to context.

Being a Painter Today: Buren’s Rough-Edged Irony

“For anyone who still wants to be a painter, you have to be a genius,” Buren jests. “That’s how saturated the history of painting is. I chose to leave behind conventional painting because I felt there were more compelling mediums. Painting has never existed without a space to contain it. Yet no one, for centuries, took that context very seriously. I found the code of painting—its relationship to the wall, the museum, the collector—to be incredibly limiting if the broader environment was ignored.

“So my focus turned to the places that host art, rather than simply the canvas or the frame. Traditional painting has produced astounding achievements, but we often see too many paintings today that fail to distinguish themselves. Indeed, there are many painters, but few geniuses.”

As for describing himself as “rough,” Buren muses: “Rough? I think of a craftsman’s hands gripping sandpaper. It’s about doing the work needed to pare away the superfluous, no matter how abrasive the process may be.”

Fare, Disfare, Rifare: In-Situ and Situated Works 1968–2025 at Palazzo Buontalenti (through July 27, 2025)

The exhibition will be on view until July 27, 2025, offering further chances to explore Buren’s evolving dialogue between stripes, materials, and architectural settings. Accompanying programs include guided tours, family workshops, accessibility activities, and more, with the aim of creating a shared public experience rather than an exclusive cultural product.

Buren’s approach resonates with his insistence on rooting art in everyday spaces. By continuously “making, unmaking, and remaking” his works, he both preserves a living archive of their origins and keeps them in dynamic conversation with each new environment. The Palazzo’s galleries, reconfigured installations, and open-air interventions become yet another chapter in the longstanding story of Daniel Buren’s striped, site-responsive art.

Federico Jonathan Cusin