Daniel Buren brings his signature colours to six hotels around the world

French artist Daniel Buren has created installations at six Belmond hotels, including a colourful pergola in Mallorca, mirrored totems in Cape Town and a window takeover in Rio de Janeiro. The Belmond hotel group invited Buren to create site-specific works at some of the most prominent hotels in its portfolio, with other locations including Venice,

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French artist Daniel Buren has created installations at six Belmond hotels, including a colourful pergola in Mallorca, mirrored totems in Cape Town and a window takeover in Rio de Janeiro.

The Belmond hotel group invited Buren to create site-specific works at some of the most prominent hotels in its portfolio, with other locations including Venice, Tuscany and Florence.

Each design in the Haltes Colorées series is different, but they all feature the stripe patterns and vivid colours that have become Buren's signature.

"There is a lot of specificity each time," explained Buren at an event to mark the opening of the sixth work in the series, at La Residencia in Deià, Mallorca.

"You cannot compare one with another, apart from the fact that each is placed in a magnificent location," he told Dezeen.

"I like having the possibility to do specific work. I call them works in situ, which means playing with a place, and the place means the history. That includes the people working there, the people visiting, the architecture and the function of the place."

In Deià, which Buren described as the most peaceful of the six locations, the artist installed a pergola that frames a terrace and lawn in front of the hotel entrance.

This structure features a frame of slender columns, picked out with black and white stripes, and a translucent roof canopy coloured in bold shades of blue, green, pink, yellow and red.

When the sun is shining, these roof panels cast colourful reflections onto the surrounding groundscape and greenery.

"I have always been interested in the use of colour," Buren said.

"It's the only way for a visual work to speak to people without speech. There are no words to help you understand what a colour is better than the colour itself."

The first work Buren created for the Haltes Colorées series was at Mount Nelson, a hotel at the foot of Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa.

Here, eight three-metre-high columns are arranged around a garden fountain. Some surfaces are mirrored, while the others feature vertical stripes, creating a sense of optical illusion.

The largest of the works was created at Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Here, colourful panels create chequered patterns across the windows of the building's grand 1920s facade.

At Villa San Michele, a 15th-century former monastery in the hills overlooking Florence, film applied to the glass roof above the hotel bar washes the interior with multi-coloured light.

The installation at Hotel Cipriani in Venice is a circular pavilion in the garden while Castello di Casole in Tuscany features three monochrome "portals" in different shapes, which frame views of the landscape.

Buren has previously created artworks on important works of architecture such as the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris and Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse in Marseille.

The artist doesn't like his works to be called "installations" as he believes the word doesn't place enough emphasis on the site-specific nature of each piece.

"It's a very mediocre way to speak about the presentation," he said. "Installation suggests you can take a piece somewhere else."

"I always say my work is a work in situ because it is there for a certain period and after that, it is nowhere."

Haltes Colorée is the third edition of MITICO, an annual art programme run by Belmond in partnership with gallery Galleria Continua. But it is the first instalment where one artist produced every piece.

The works will remain in place for up to a year, depending on the location.

The photography is courtesy of Belmond.

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