Comme tombées du ciel, les couleurs in situ et en mouvement (As if fallen from the sky, the colors in situ and in motion), Daniel Buren’s spectacular color and light intervention at the Liège-Guillemins train station in Belgium, takes a precise approach to the notion of “as-is,” minimally altering yet radically transforming what already exists. Unveiled in October 2022, the work is completely integrated into the Santiago Calatrava-designed station, which serves as a major stop for domestic and international rail travel. In the main part of the roof-based installation, squares of white, blue, orange, pink, and green are arranged in a chess board-like grid. Contrasting striped panels appear in red, white, and yellow. Together, they project a colorful array of ever-changing shadows that heighten the experience of the space below. The precise interplay of color and light and the full variety of visual effects have not yet been completely revealed; as the seasons shift, new perspectives keep emerging.
Robert Preece: How long was this project in the works?
Daniel Buren: Joël Benzakin, independent curator and organizer of the project, and Stephan Uhoda, director of Uhoda Group, which has its headquarters in Liège, first contacted me in May or June of 2021, asking if I would be interested in doing something at the station. I signed the contract the following month and set to work defining the entire project. After the plans were approved, we started to work on the glass roof structure in early August 2022. The work was completed on October 10, 2022, with an official opening on October 15.
RP: How did you go about choosing the colors and shapes within the design? Did you have to consult with the Liège-Guillemins station management or with the Calatrava studio?
DB: It’s always difficult for me to speak about how the colors are chosen because I don’t really know. Once I was happy with the arrangement on the glass structure of the roof—a sort of gigantic chess grid covering two hectares—the only thing I used as a guide was my will. The pattern made a strong contrast between one color and the next, so I worked with a juxtaposition of contrasting colors following this principle. I had to select from the rather limited palette of colors available from the producer of the transparent, self-adhesive vinyl film. I never consulted with the station management or Calatrava’s studio.
RP: Were there unexpected challenges or issues along the way?
DB: The team hired to manage the work was the same one that, 10 years earlier, had overseen the placing of the glass roof sections. They knew the whole situation pretty well. Not a single negative thing happened during the installation process, which took almost three months of hard work.
RP: How does the work change with various light conditions and through the seasons?
DB: As soon as you take the risk of working outside, and especially here, on a huge glass roof, you are completely dependent on changes in the weather. This is one of the reasons that I love to work outside. Working with any kind of skylight opens that risk to the maximum degree. If you see the work on a gray day, cloudy and sunless, the effects of the color projections disappear almost completely. As soon as the sun shows itself though, the work virtually explodes everywhere.
These two extremes within the same work are part of the visual game—the reason that I find such a situation so vivid and interesting. What you see can jump from, let’s say close to one or 10 percent, to an extreme density, with hundreds of multiplied new aspects, 100 times stronger, full of visual accidents, completely unexpected and exciting, sometimes even completely crazy.
RP: What projected shapes on what elements in the station have you found especially interesting?
DB: I have been most surprised by the nearest projection of the colored skylight, which is on the white concrete supporting structure. This is particularly interesting, and, for me, totally unexpected. These beams, with or without any sun, are literally colored, reflecting the colored glass nearest to them. So, next to the colored glass elements that form the roof ’s chessboard-like design, the beams supporting the glass structure move from completely white to the strong color that’s glued at 90 degrees next to them. For me, this effect was the most surprising, and you can see it in any weather condition.
RP: Are the changes in the space being documented over time? I can imagine that time-lapse surveillance camera footage would be fascinating, capturing fixed objects, changing color and light, and people moving through the space.
DB: That’s absolutely what we are doing. The space will be recorded for the duration of the piece, over one full year.
RP: You’ve made many colored light interventions. Which ones would you want to mention in connection with the Liège-Guillemins train station work?
DB: I’ve done many transparent light and color works on vertical glass walls, as well as on horizontal skylights over the last 50 years. My recent projects include Observatory of Light (2016–17), installed across the glass “sails” of the Fondation Louis Vuitton building in Paris, designed by Frank Gehry. For Excentrique(s) (2012), I filled the central nave of the Grand Palais in Paris with a canopy of circles and covered the 50-meter-high glass dome with a blue checkerboard. For another project of comparable scale, I transformed all of the thousands of triangles designed as part of the architecture of the KAFD Conference Center in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (2021), completely changing the inside of the building with the projection of colored triangles.
I made the very first big work like this for “Ambiente/Arte,” the Venice Biennale organized by Germano Celant in 1976. I covered the skylights of the pavilion, which changed the light and ambiance inside each room where the exhibition was on view. This also decreased the temperature; the summer of 1976 was extremely hot in Venice, two to five degrees warmer than normal during the day. So, this was already a way to use—and play with—the weather.
For my “room” in this huge exhibition, I chose the only one where it was possible to remove the skylight. Therefore, it was the only room using the direct color of the natural light, and it became a sort of key to understanding the use of all the other rooms in the exhibition. Since the skylight remained completely open, we needed to redo the floor of the room in order to drain any water that entered after it rained.n The skylight was replaced in its original position after the show, but the floor, like a courtyard, retained a trace of the transformation, which remained visible for many years. It might still exist today.
Daniel Buren’s Comme tombées du ciel, les couleurs in situ et en mouvement remains on view through October 15, 2023.
