Quotes of the Day

Young artists seeking to learn from the life-story of Daniel Buren should do a little shopping. One day in September 1965, Buren was nosing through Paris's textile market in search of the colored sheets and rough jute fabric he then used as painting materials. Instead, he happened on a roll of striped canvas material intended for roller blinds, and art history was made. With these 8.7-cm-wide candy stripes, Buren had discovered the motif that would be his signature for the next 30-odd years. "If it hadn't been that fabric, I'd have ended up finding something else," Buren says today. "Our gestures are sometimes unconscious, but they're never entirely accidental."

Accidental or not, Buren's discovery provided him with one of the most potent brand identities in contemporary art, almost as instantly recognizable as McDonald's golden arches or the Nike swoosh. Over the past three decades, he has applied his stripes to a bewildering variety of surfaces: posters, art gallery walls, flags strung across the streets of downtown New York, museum attendants' waistcoats and — most famously — those stumpy black and white columns in the courtyard of Paris' Palais Royal. They have made him arguably the best-known living French artist, a recognition made official at the Centre Pompidou last week by a huge and multifaceted Buren exhibition, which runs until Sept. 23. They have also brought their fair share of detractors: the critic Arthur Danto has written off Buren's work as "insipid stripes," while American artist Donald Judd famously described the man himself as a "Parisian wallpaper hanger."

In the Pompidou's Museum of Modern Art the walls behind paintings by Picabia, Kupka, Van Doesburg, Pollock and Matisse have been covered by Buren's black and white stripes. He first adopted this technique at the Documenta V exhibition in Kassel, Germany in 1972. Then, as now, he intended to challenge the way museums classify and present works of art. Seen behind Pollock's swirls, Buren's stripes provide the viewer with a powerful reminder that the wall — and thus the museum itself — exists. They also allude to the idea that painting has a decorative function, like wallpaper, and doesn't simply exist as pure art. Buren's signature stripes are more than a snappy gimmick. They are used as a neutral marker — a "visual tool," as he puts it — to draw the viewer's attention to the characteristics of the space that surrounds them.

Soon after stumbling across his "visual tool" nearly 40 years ago, Buren abandoned painting in favor of the field that has obsessed him ever since: three-dimensional space. In Le Parking, the work on display in the foyer of the Pompidou's underground auditorium, Buren explodes the building's partitions by painting the space to look just like the parking garage one story below. In Les Couleurs: Sculptures he opts for more blurring of boundaries, projecting the museum out into the surrounding cityscape: from the Pompidou's sixth-floor roof terrace, visitors use seaside-style binoculars to pick out the striped flags that Buren has placed on the roofs of 15 Paris landmarks.

The centerpiece to the entire show is Le Musée qui n'existait pas — a vast installation on the sixth floor that marks a stunning break with the Pompidou's sometimes rather academic exhibition style. In 2,300 sq m, Buren has built a labyrinth of 6-m by 6-m chambers: "I've only used half of them," he says. "Every alternate one is neutralized, like the black squares on a chessboard. Each white square contains a different piece, some of them revisiting things I've done before and some of them totally new." Many of the pieces allude to the three-dimensional structures Buren has concentrated on in recent years; in them viewers are literally surrounded by color. As the visitor wanders through the shimmering maze, mirrors create endless lines of sight and doors open to vistas of ever-changing perspectives.

It's a bravura display of optical craft, which is effortlessly entertaining at the same time. Throughout his career, some critics have judged Buren's work to be over-conceptual while others have derided it as over-decorative. This exhibition makes it clear that Buren, now 64, is aiming for a middle path between the two extremes — a conceptualism that can also be easy on the eye. "I don't see how you can distinguish the conceptual dimension from the visual one," he says. "When work's too centered on ideas, it's condemned from the outset." Work, of course, should be centered on stripes.

• NICHOLAS LE QUESNE/Paris
• Buren exhibition displays artist's wit