{"id":98674,"date":"2025-10-23T06:45:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T06:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/98674\/"},"modified":"2025-10-23T06:45:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T06:45:08","slug":"cai-guo-qiang-marks-centre-pompidous-farewell-with-fireworks-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/98674\/","title":{"rendered":"cai guo-qiang marks centre pompidou\u2019s farewell with fireworks painting"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Closing Moment at centre pompidou<\/p>\n

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The Centre Pompidou<\/a> in Paris<\/a> closed on September 22nd for a five-year renovation. Before construction began, the museum<\/a> invited artist Cai Guo-Qiang<\/a> to create a final gesture across its facade. His public artwork, The Last Carnival, unfolded as a daylight fireworks<\/a> event that turned the building\u2019s exposed structure into a temporary canvas.<\/p>\n

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From the plaza at Beaubourg, the familiar tangle of ducts, glass, and steel served as both backdrop and participant. Smoke curled around the colored pipes. Powdered pigments hung in the air. The museum that had always revealed its inner workings \u2014 its escalators, its vents, its public spine \u2014 became for a brief time a surface for painting with fire. See designboom\u2019s coverage of where to find the Centre Pompidou\u2019s temporary and permanent exhibitions during its closure here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Cai Guo-Qiang\u2019s\u00a0explosive artwork<\/p>\n

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Cai Guo-Qiang<\/a>\u2019s fireworks were designed to respond to the geometry of the Centre Pompidou<\/a> rather than the open sky. The horizontal grids and cantilevered walkways shaped the rhythm of the explosions, each burst aligning with the structure\u2019s industrial cadence. Instead of distant bursts, the firework trails seemed to breathe through the building\u2019s framework, tracing its contours in light and smoke.<\/p>\n

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Seen from the forecourt, the architecture and atmosphere folded together. The clouds of color softened the hard edges of the steel frame. Shifting tones of red, gold, and violet drifted through the transparent facade, momentarily altering how daylight filtered into the plaza.<\/p>\n

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image \u00a9 Centre Pompidou \/ Pierre Malherbet<\/p>\n

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The Role of Technology<\/p>\n

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For this project, Cai worked with his custom artificial intelligence model, cAI\u2122, to generate the visual sequences. The software produced layered compositions that the artist translated into hand-laid charges of gunpowder. This dialogue between digital code and physical combustion gave the fireworks a quiet structure \u2014 an unseen logic guiding the choreography of light and form across the Pompidou\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n

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Curator J\u00e9r\u00f4me Neutres described the event as the first time the museum\u2019s facade became \u2018a monumental painting.\u2019 The description felt apt. The building, long a symbol of transparency and mechanical order, momentarily became an instrument of transformation, its familiar outlines animated by color and motion.<\/p>\n

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image \u00a9 Centre Pompidou \/ Pierre Malherbet<\/p>\n

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image \u00a9 Centre Pompidou \/ Pierre Malherbet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Closing Moment at centre pompidou \u00a0 The Centre Pompidou in Paris closed on September 22nd for a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":98675,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,29143,4427,308,93,15529,61,60,19989,4199],"class_list":{"0":"post-98674","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-cai-guo-qiang","13":"tag-centre-pompidou","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-fireworks","17":"tag-ie","18":"tag-ireland","19":"tag-museums-and-galleries","20":"tag-public-art"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98674\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/98675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}