In the late 1960s, strange markings started appearing on walls and gates of Paris, a city in the midst of violent upheaval. The markings were always stripes of exactly 8.7-centimeter width, and always alternated white with a color, say, blue or black. Soon, the same stripes appeared on bus stops all over Los Angeles and in Tokyo. Before long, the art world had taken note, and two years later, the rogue poster artist–Daniel Buren–was hanging a 66-foot-tall banner of stripes in the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum.
What makes Buren’s stripe such a durable idea is that it was never really about stripes at all. He has always described it as a “visual tool” – a fixed, almost bureaucratic unit of measurement he could apply to any surface, in any city, to make you suddenly notice the architecture, the light, or the crowd around it. Half a century into using that same 8.7-centimeter interval, Buren is still finding new materials to run it through, and the fiber-optic tapestries pictured here are among the strangest and most beautiful results yet – stripe painting reborn as something you could plug into a wall socket. It is exactly the kind of work that belongs in any serious conversation about where contemporary conceptual art is headed when it collides with new material science.
That collaboration is worth lingering on, because it is really the whole story here. Brochier Soieries is a French textile house with roots in traditional silk-weaving, and the leap from centuries-old looms to optical fiber is not a small one – it means treating light itself as a thread, woven on the same equipment that once produced fine silk yardage. The result reads less like a lit sign and more like fabric that happens to breathe color, which is precisely the tension Buren is after: an ancient craft and weaving tradition carrying a distinctly contemporary current.
If that sounds like a meteoric rise, it’s because it was–especially for an artist who has spent his career refining a singular visual tool. He calls them affichages sauvages–savage posters–and they’ve appeared on Hermes scarfs and the vast interior courtyard of the Palais Royal.
Buren has experimented with numerous other mediums: Last year, as the fifth artist to participate in the Monumenta series, he installed a canopy of brightly colored lenses that transformed the floor of the Grand Palais into a raucous light show. Still, he continually returns to his signature stripe, which he uses as a unit of measurement, a standard way to frame and call attention to space.
This week, Buren returns to his roots with Electricity Paper Vinyl, a show at the Bortolami Gallery in New York. The 74-year-old artist will unveil new affichages sauvages that, thanks to the help of textile company Brochier Soieries, glow with fiber-optic-enabled luminescence. “After having worked with flags, linen, silk, and other fabrics, [Brochier] came to me six or seven years ago asking if I wanted to try to use a very new technique they were developing using optical fibers as a material instead of cotton or silk,” Buren tells Co.Design. “I did a first prototype and then continued developing other possibilities to push the game and see what this new technique could give.” A recent show at Lisson Gallery, in London, had the artist experimenting with radiance and color, but the works at Bortolami are an entirely new technical paradigm.
What is easy to miss in photographs is scale and duration: these are not backlit panels flipped on for an opening-night crowd, they are woven objects meant to hold their glow steadily, the way a piece of cloth holds a dye. Seen in person, the fiber-optic stripe reportedly behaves less like a screen and more like a living pattern – the light shifting subtly as viewers move past and the weave catches it from different angles. It is a reminder that some of the most inventive work happening in textile and material design right now is coming out of artists’ studios and centuries-old weaving houses working together, rather than from either alone – proof that a fifty-year-old idea can still find an entirely new material to live in.
