White acrylic paint on white and blue striped cloth 1970

Here, white acrylic paint meets blue and white stripes of cloth in a work by Daniel Buren. I can only imagine how this piece came into being. Perhaps Buren started with the cloth—the ready-made. And then he thought: what if I could just cover this surface with my own mark-making? What if I could disrupt its order? I know that feeling. It is about wanting to mark or unmark a surface. I feel that, as an artist, you're always asking yourself what kind of surface you want to deal with. Do you want to expose it? Or hide it? Here, Buren seems to hide it. But not completely. You can still see the stripes. They're fighting their way through. It's a painting in which both the material and the artist are wrestling. This is how artists talk to one another and to themselves. What if I did this? What if I tried that? And the conversation goes on across decades, across centuries.