Daniel Buren offers a new face to the iconic Copacabana Palace

Colorful windows to illuminate an immaculate facade: the Copacabana Palace, an emblematic century-old hotel in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, shows a new face thanks to an intervention by French artist Daniel Buren.

Inaugurated on Thursday, the in situ work of this star of contemporary art can be admired until September 30. “A priori, I had complete carte blanche (...). Afterwards, I said to myself that the simplest way to have access everywhere was to work on all the windows on the facade", which allows for light effects "both at night and during the day, inside. and outside,” says Daniel Buren, 85, to AFP. The window panes of the bedrooms and living rooms which offer a breathtaking view of the legendary beach and the ocean were covered with layers of yellow, blue, pink, green and red vinyl. The choice of colors? “Always at random,” says the artist famous for his columns installed in the courtyard of the Palais-Royal in Paris.

“There are very few (color) choices in these materials. And anyway, if there were thousands of them, that would embarrass me more than anything else. I think that for a set of colors, as long as they are all contrasting, it can be any,” he insists. The visual effect is different depending on the exposure of the windows to light. At night, only those whose rooms are lit by their occupants are visible, creating a play of light and shadow.

In addition to the hundred windows of this iconic facade of the Marvelous City, the pergola of the main entrance was covered with vinyl films which project the colors onto the ground, like a shimmering carpet. This work at the Copacabana Palace, which celebrated its hundredth anniversary last year, is the second in a series entitled Colorful Stops, in luxury hotels of the Belmond brand, from the French giant LVMH. The first was inaugurated last month, when columns with alternating vertical bands of white and color were erected around a fountain at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town, South Africa. But the particularity of the colored windows of the facade of the Copacabana Palace is that the spectacle is not reserved for the customers: “Everything is visible at a single glance by people, whether they come to this place or not. hotel,” concludes Daniel Buren.