The colors of Daniel Buren on the iconic Copacabana Palace in Rio

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 light shows “both at night and during the day, inside and outside,” Daniel Buren, 85, tells 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 choices (of colors) in these materials. And anyway, if there were thousands of them, it would embarrass me more than anything else. I think that for a color scheme, at As long as they are all contrasting, it can be any of them,” 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 “Marvellous 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, of 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 on the facade of the Copacabana Palace is that the spectacle is not reserved for customers: "the whole thing is visible at a single glance by people, whether they come or no in this hotel", concludes Daniel Buren.