Daniel Buren never leaves anyone indifferent. After Kiefer, Serra, Boltanski and Kapoor, this year the artist of vast public spaces has mastered the Grand Palais. He is also a teacher, theoretician and educator. A unique encounter with Buren at his intervention, still in situ, and how he defines colour.

It is always quite difficult to know exactly how you get to this or that position, or even decision. I think it was a long maturing where, confusedly, I sensed "gaps" in the work, which I sought to fill through any means. At a very young age, I had been quite shocked by the fact that all the qualities I found in artists' work in talking directly with them in their studio, surrounded by their own art, partially disappeared when these same pieces were hung on the walls of the galleries that displayed them. For me, a shift occurred then and I did not understand to what extent. I was 17 years old and I had met a plethora of artists, from the most famous like Picasso, Chagall, Masson and many others, to unknown illustrators. Each time, with more or less scope, much of the qualities that I found in their works disappeared with this "transporting" from the place of production to the place of exhibition. I think that this feeling, which became more pronounced with time, pushed me little by little to abandon the idea of working in a workshop, then made me face up to radical questions, for example: "What to do if a painter no longer has a workshop?" Hence turning directly to the streets to work and therefore to the concept of maintaining this work attitude, for as long as possible, and learning to work relative to and within a specific place each time as my work progressed. I still currently operate in the experimentation provoked by this attitude of work quickly defined as "in situ" since the early 70s.

The concept of "visual tool" arrived a little later, but here at the Palais Royal, the reason for the use of black and white colours is mainly due to the crossroads of the study of place, climate and available materials. This study made me proceed by elimination. Initially, I would have liked to use not only coloured bands like green, pink or red, but also a coloured floor. In the study of the available materials, none - with the exception of less than safe plastic materials, or ceramics that I did not want - existed that would seriously withstand the weather in the climate of a city like Paris. The only materials that were suitable and relatively stable in the weather were, of course, those that make up the majority of the city itself, namely stone, marble, granite, cement, asphalt, zinc, water, etc. Which marbles are resistant to pollution for example? We can find beautiful ones there: blue, pink, red, green and other colours; they have only one defect: after 6 to 10 months out in the wind and rain, they become discoloured and tend to become quite homogeneous, that is to say, grey. The only one to similarly lose its brightness but not to change colour too much is black marble (or granite), which, when it turns pale, becomes dark grey. The same goes for asphalt, which changes from black to grey after only a year. So I thought that the colour "loss" from black to dark grey was much more visually acceptable than the loss of a red or a green that would have given a very special look to the whole piece, swiftly impeded by a diminishing, whereby any idea of the original colour would have disappeared. So I opted for black and white and the most stable materials, namely asphalt, cement, granite, marble (white and black), grates (dark grey). We will also take into account that, even after a year of systematic discolouration, from loss of contrast here, the slightest bit of rain - which is not uncommon in Paris! - restores all the brilliance and original colours. That is why I chose these colours, and not others. However, at night, the piece transforms and a colourful work - blue, green and red - emerges.

The parameters are numerous. The very last one - the one to be wary of - is one's own taste in the matter. The key factor is, for example, the way certain colours are perceived in one culture or another. For example, in Japan, alternating white and black or white and purple bands are the signs and colours of mourning. Everyone immediately understands them in that sense. So if I use these two colours in a piece and I have no intention of making any reference to mourning or death, all my work will be read in a way that is totally different to how I could imagine it. Such a piece of work would then be very heavily loaded with a meaning that it could not escape, all the while being completely foreign to it. The knowledge of such a fact will therefore allow the elimination (or acceptance) of this sign and these colours knowingly and, thus, avoid possible counter-sensations. Parameters of this kind, more or less acute, are numerous. These are the parameters that interest me much more than others which tell us that red is exciting and that blue is calming, for example. Even if there is some accuracy in this type of physiological relationship, they do not interest me in the first instance.

They allow the colour to be projected and to therefore colour, in a very special way, everything it touches. The transparency and quality of a colour projected through a coloured filter is, in my eyes, much more alive than a painted colour, covering a surface. The dialogue between these two ways of using colour in one place, for example, is extremely rich.

Here, I believe, it occupies the main role. It moves constantly according to the whims of the sun and the clouds, from the state of sprinkling the ground, to that of quasi-photographic impressions printed directly, and printed mainly on the ground, but also on everything these coloured projections are going to touch (vertical uprights, walls, panels, people...).

My position is very simple and employed often for more than forty years. I use what is offered to me or what I can find. Fittingly, in these cases, all the relationships that these colours will be able to create together here, mainly thanks to the incessant and multiple effects of shadow and light, are not due to a specific choice for which the artist would be the creator, but rather to the fantastic and unique game created, outside of the artist/author's taste, through the intrinsic word of the colours in question which are here, you could say, through their circumstances (their manufacture, their chemical obligations, the choice of the company...).

None in particular. That is to say, every one in particular.