Cai Guo-Qiang Marks Centre Pompidou’s Farewell with a Colossal Fireworks Painting

On September 22, 2025, the Centre Pompidou in Paris closed for an extensive five-year renovation, but not before a final, transformative gesture. To mark this symbolic transition, the museum invited Cai Guo-Qiang, known worldwide for painting with fire and gunpowder, to create a public artwork that would embody the spirit of risk and innovation that has always defined the institution.

A Closing Moment at Centre Pompidou

His project, titled The Last Carnival, was a daytime fireworks painting that unfolded across the museum’s façade, turning its exposed skeleton of ducts, glass, and steel into a temporary stage for light, smoke, and sound.

For curator Jérôme Neutres, this event was more than a spectacle. It was a ritual of passage. “It was the first time the museum’s façade became a monumental painting,” said Neutres. “Cai transformed architecture into emotion. For a few moments, the building seemed alive, breathing, shimmering, and reflecting the intelligence of our time.”

Painting with Fire and Code

Unlike traditional fireworks, Cai’s explosions were not random. Each detonation corresponded to data-driven sequences generated by his custom-built artificial intelligence system, cAI™, short for “AI Cai.”

“For a few moments, the building seemed alive, breathing, shimmering,”

Jérôme Neutres

The artist developed this algorithmic twin to help envision complex patterns, simulate combustion rhythms, and suggest new aesthetic structures that would be impossible to design by hand alone. Through a process that blended machine precision with human instinct, Cai choreographed an artwork that unfolded in three acts, each guided by both his intuition and his digital counterpart.

“The fireworks were a dialogue between the artist and his robot self,” noted Neutres. “A collaboration between two intelligences, one born of flesh, the other of code.”

The Curator’s Vision

Jérôme Neutres, a leading French curator and essayist, saw in The Last Carnival a powerful allegory for the relationship between art and technology, and by extension, between humanity and its evolving tools.

Formerly a senior curator at the Grand Palais and director within the French National Museums, Neutres has long advocated for projects that bridge spiritual and scientific imagination. His curatorial philosophy situates technology not as a threat to creativity but as its next frontier.

“Cai’s AI doesn’t replace the artist. It extends him,” he explained. “We’re witnessing a new Renaissance, where code becomes pigment and algorithms become collaborators. The role of the curator now is to help audiences read these new forms of intelligence as part of the human story.”

Robotics, Rhythm, and the Pulse of the Pompidou

To execute the complex performance, Cai combined AI-generated simulations with robotic ignition systems that precisely timed each explosion along the museum’s structure. The choreography responded to the Pompidou’s exposed mechanical veins—escalators, vents, and tubes—as if the building itself were a living organism synchronized with the fireworks.

“The role of the curator now is to help audiences read these new forms of intelligence as part of the human story,”

Jérôme Neutres

The result was a fusion of art and engineering, a kind of cybernetic performance painting that embodied the Pompidou’s own identity: half-machine, half-museum, wholly alive. From the plaza, the interplay of smoke, pigment, and metallic form seemed to mimic neural pathways, a visual metaphor for how technology, like art, ignites thought.

“The Pompidou has always been a building about transparency, about showing its inner workings,” said Neutres. “In Cai’s hands, that transparency becomes a metaphor for the 21st century, a world where even our creativity is shared with the systems we build.”

The Future of Artmaking

Neutres believes The Last Carnival represents a new era of artmaking, one that accepts artificial intelligence, robotics, and algorithmic tools as genuine co-authors.

“Cai’s partnership with his AI model, cAI™, is not about surrendering authorship,” he said. “It’s about expanding perception, letting machines illuminate what we cannot yet imagine. The artist becomes both creator and conductor, orchestrating a new language of light, data, and combustion.”

This approach, he argues, resonates with the Pompidou’s original vision: a place where art, science, and society converge in open dialogue.

A Monumental Farewell

As the final sparks faded and the air cleared, the museum stood veiled in a soft mist of color, a poetic haze between past and future.

“It’s about expanding perception,”

Jérôme Neutres

“Cai’s fireworks were the Pompidou’s last heartbeat before its rebirth,” reflected Neutres. “A closing act that reaffirms creation’s power to renew itself, human, digital, and divine.”

In that moment, Paris witnessed not just an ending, but a beginning: a preview of the future where creativity moves fluidly between hand and machine, between artist and algorithm, between fire and code.