‘Bureau de Change’ is about an art installation conceived at the time of the notorious Van Gogh 'Sunflowers' sale in 1987 when £24.5 million was the highest price ever paid for an artwork. The original installation at Matt's Gallery, London included a reconstruction of the 'Sunflowers' from a thousand pounds worth of coins, a surveillance camera and monitor, a viewing platform and a security guard.

Is Bureau de Change a performance or an installation? Stillness suggests the museum, the bank vault. Even the human being has an inert, guardian role. Stillness contradicts the body-movements expected in performance, and our own entry as flesh and blood humans.

The warm colour of sunlight – sunflower yellows, ochres, browns: Van Gogh's opening to the warmth of the south becomes the metallic glint of silver and gold. 

The identification between money and oil paint is so extraordinarily well done that you marvel at the precision of a metaphor so strikingly physical, so non-verbal. Matter and energy are ambivalently related. Is art debased? Is money elevated? Is the kitschification of Van Gogh's work inescapable, or is his sincerity redeemed?

Masses of coins are re-arranged into the configuration of a well-known painting in the rectangular frame of art. Painting and guard share a common “support” [an interposed wooden floor with irregular edges]. Schizophrenias of value are tuned up to a crazy degree. A fleeting cross-reference to the art of prisoners – time-killing, perfectionist, locked to appearances – also makes itself felt.

However, if you touch it, it will turn to dust. It is held together only by its own weight. It is temporary, fleeting, an illusion. The meticulous craft is both straightfaced and ironic. Bureau de Change is not only a brilliant visual polemic against dehumanised values, but also a complex meditation on art and creativity.

– Guy Brett

Description source: publicity material