The iconic Centre Pompidou in Paris closed its doors on September 22nd for an extensive five-year renovation, but not before hosting one of the most spectacular farewell gestures in museum history. Renowned Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang transformed the museum's distinctive facade into a massive canvas for his explosive artwork titled "The Last Carnival," creating a breathtaking daylight fireworks display that celebrated the building's unique architectural character.
The public art installation unfolded across the museum's famous exposed structure, turning the familiar maze of colorful ducts, glass panels, and steel framework into both backdrop and active participant in the performance. From the bustling plaza at Beaubourg, visitors witnessed an extraordinary transformation as smoke curled around the building's signature colored pipes and powdered pigments filled the air. The museum, which has always proudly displayed its inner workings through visible escalators, ventilation systems, and public walkways, became a temporary surface for painting with fire and light.
Cai Guo-Qiang's fireworks were specifically designed to respond to and complement the Centre Pompidou's distinctive geometric structure rather than simply exploding into the open sky. The artist carefully choreographed each explosion to align with the building's horizontal grids and cantilevered walkways, creating a rhythm that matched the structure's industrial character. Instead of traditional distant bursts, the firework trails appeared to breathe through the building's steel framework, tracing its bold contours with trails of light and billowing smoke.
Viewed from the museum's forecourt, the spectacle created a mesmerizing fusion of architecture and atmosphere. The clouds of vibrant color softened the hard edges of the building's steel frame, while shifting tones of red, gold, and violet drifted through the transparent facade. This interplay of light and smoke momentarily altered how natural daylight filtered into the plaza below, creating an ever-changing visual experience for the gathered crowd.
What made this project particularly innovative was Cai's collaboration with technology to create the visual sequences. The artist worked with his custom artificial intelligence model called "cAI" to generate layered compositions that served as blueprints for the performance. These digital designs were then translated into carefully hand-laid charges of gunpowder, creating a fascinating dialogue between cutting-edge digital code and ancient physical combustion techniques. This process gave the fireworks display a subtle underlying structure and logic that guided the choreography of light and form across the Pompidou's surface.
Curator Jérôme Neutres described the historic event as the first time the museum's facade had been transformed into a monumental painting, a description that perfectly captured the artistic significance of the moment. The Centre Pompidou, which has long stood as a symbol of architectural transparency and mechanical order, was momentarily transformed into an instrument of artistic transformation. Its familiar industrial outlines were animated by waves of color and motion, creating a poetic farewell that honored both the building's past and its future after renovation.
