Polygon for Poggibonsi

Daniel Buren held his first one-man show in Italy, at the Galleria Apollinaire run by Guido Le Noci. On that occasion the artist, polemical with regards to the commercial system of art as well as to the rules imposed on art by official exhibition spaces, "closed" the gallery with a cloth that had vertical stripes: a pattern that stood for the crisis in painting, in representation, in the rhetoric of the "genius" culture and its ability to operate. Le Noci took the suggestion literally and really closed his gallery, thirty years ahead of analogous operations in the Nineties. His shows, just like Buren’s works, began to travel freely in lived-in spaces and to mix with the urban environment. As for the French artist, he continued to study the possibilities offered by the exploration of different contexts, from scraps of industrial archaeology right up to the courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris.
Buren’s work for Arte all’Arte also belongs to this logic of reinterpreting the environment. He chose to work at the Cassero in Poggibonsi: a military fortress designed by Giuliano da Sangallo and prototype of the Forte Belvedere in Florence. So, it is a place built for military purposes, surrounded by strong walls.: Buren outlined the fortified area in front of the Cassero with a series of flags arranged in the shape of an arrow: a form that also has war associations but that the artist transforms into a giant greeting of peace. The flags are arranged along the fortress walls, that is to say along the area that is, visually, most aggressive. On three sides of the perimeter, the artist has raised 153 steel flagpoles, six meters high, to which the same number of banners are attached and move freely in the wind. If the colors of war are dark and mimetic, those of peace should be happy and visible: in fact Buren has chosen colors that cover the whole chromatic spectrum and naturally all the flags have vertical stripes. Standing inside the fortress, the visitor finds himself inside a light but imposing polychrome fence that separates him from the rest of the world. With the nut trees and peach trees growing in the flat field (located next to a sheer drop of the hillside) the installation emphasizes the tranquillity of the place. Instead, looking at the work from outside, one notes how the defensive architectural structure becomes more visible, even to the point of showing viewers a happy rainbow that can be seen from the via Cassia, from the Siena-Florence highway and more secondary roads.