How does one inhabit this impressive circular architecture, and how does one create a programme in this unique museum?

The Bourse de Commerce’s architecture is utterly atypical. I almost want to say that it’s a utopian architecture. A circle is a kind of perfection. It’s truly an architecture that impels movement, movement towards new ideas and new ways of exhibiting art, especially contemporary art. Thanks to Tadao Ando’s absolutely extraordinary intervention, this architecture offers us a bridge: a bridge between past and present, between this absolutely magnificent architecture, a secret that remains practically unknown right in the centre of Paris, and the concrete. Especially since Le Corbusier (who greatly inspired Tadao Ando), concrete has shown us that architecture is something that we can shape and set into motion.  It is able to host any kind of dialogue with a resolutely contemporary thinking. This is not a traditional museum of pomp and circumstance. This is a radically new experience. What then is a space?

How do the Collection’s works occupy this space?   

As concerns the Pinault Collection, this experience focuses very much on artists who are inventing a new way of making art through the medium of the exhibition. This can be in the field of painting, sculpture, photographs, or drawings. The artwork becomes immersive. It becomes its own stage. This unique space offers a new way of experiencing art. It is a highly sensitive approach in which everything is possible. It is an experimental space.  We are far removed from the white cube, or the black box, which houses video works, for example. Starting with the works in the collection, there is something on the order of a reenactment. How do you get something to live anew that already exists, namely the artist's work, a practice that confronts his or her work with this utterly novel space? For that matter, Tadao Ando has emphasised how much he sought to regenerate this nineteenth-century architecture. I think that, for the artists that François Pinault wants to invite to the Bourse de Commerce, there is something about this unique architecture that inspires them to reinvent some of their works or to invent new ones. There is something absolutely fascinating and extremely exciting about the Pinault Collection. It’s what François Pinault calls “risk-taking”.  We throw ourselves into contemporary creation without a safety net. We take chances. We don’t always know where the artists will take us, and this is what makes contemporary creation one of the most exciting forms of art. 

How would you define the Pinault Collection and the view of our time that this collection provides?

François Pinault’s collection is not a classic collection. He has a very particular view. For that matter, all the artists realise this when he comes to visit them in their studio. It's a perspective that really gets to the very heart of a work of art. There are absolutely no preconceived notions in François Pinault's approach to art. This is a man who still today climbs up the stairs to the studios of the youngest artists as much as to the workshops of artists with whom he has built a relationship over the last 30 years and who are highly renowned on the international scene. He is immensely curious, always willing to look, with this absolute empathy for the artist’s work. And I also wish to say, who is very sincere, and I believe that the extraordinary strength of this collection is that it continues to be written in the present. There's something that resonates very closely with what we're experiencing right now. How does a work of art take the pulse of the here and now? 

How does one share such a personal view, this special collection with the public?

This collection was established in a completely polyphonic way. There is nothing academic about it. To the contrary, it has numerous strands that show that art is eminently complex. It’s not something that we can simply pigeon-hole. The bond with the Bourse de Commerce as a building is very strong. There is something to the order of the various routes one can take through the building that goes right to the heart of what contemporary art is about. There are different paths and many forks in the road. There isn’t a single vision of art here; it is instead polyphonic. And for there to be polyphony, there has to be an orchestra conductor, and François Pinault is the conductor of this orchestra of a collection, leading us through all sorts of harmonies and dissonances in the world of contemporary art.  

When does contemporary art begin? How long have we been “contemporary”?

It has often been said that contemporary art began after WWII and especially in the 1960s. But the cursor of contemporary art is constantly shifting and occupying older eras. Contemporary art was born of modernity, which was born before the avant-gardes. Painting was a medium on the verge of being banished and forgotten. Yet, as we reach back to older eras of painting, there are many artists who are bringing the medium of painting back into fashion, as if painting were this absolutely universal language. It’s no longer a date, a style, or a medium. Contemporary art speaks to us in the here and now. It helps us be more human in the world. Contemporary art has this great capacity to give us the keys to understanding the world we live in today.

What was your own first encounter with a work of art?

I think I was really, really young when I encountered my first artwork. I think I was two or three years old, and my encounter was with a yellow work by Soto called Pénétrable at the Fondation Maeght. It was a beautiful, summer day, the cicadas buzzing, and all of a sudden, here was this piece that I could touch. You could enter the work, and I had the sensation of the sun’s rays shining right through me. This highly immersive experience of an art that you can enter sparked a passion for art that I have felt since childhood, as well as a desire to share art with a public unfamiliar with what we call installations. Obviously you can contemplate a painting, but you can also immerse yourself in what we call an installation or in an exhibition. When you are within the work, you feel more present, in the moment, but you can also escape. You can take off, dream, reinvent yourself. So, the way artists give us a totally new experience of space and time through their works or in exhibitions is something that totally captivates me. Art has to be able to speak to everyone.