Arrival at Liège-Guillemins train station at 9:46 am.

The sky over the Wallonian provincial capital is gray.

It's drizzling from low-hanging clouds, and yet: the entrance to Liège, which is only a good hour's train ride from Cologne or Düsseldorf and yet seems to be so much closer to the French capital, which is more than twice as far away, has never been so colourful.

Green, blue, orange, fuchsia, milky white light.

"As if fallen from heaven, colors in situ and in motion" is the name of the installation by the French painter and conceptual artist Daniel Buren, which opened in mid-October.

For a year, the 10,000 square meter work of art, covering a third of the station roof area with colorful vinyl foil, will draw the gaze of thousands of passengers every day.

Depending on the time, the position of the sun and the weather conditions, the play of light that wanders through Calatrava's concrete waves bathes trains, platforms, people boarding and alighting in different colors.

Artist turned out to be an admirer of the station

As with previous installations in the Emma Museum in Espoo, Finland, or in the Musée d'Art Moderne et contemporain in Strasbourg, Buren arranged the colors he chose according to the alphabetical order of the respective national language.

Bleu begins in francophone Liège, Vert finishes the suit sequence.

Stéphan Uhoda came up with the idea of ​​bringing together the internationally renowned architect of dynamic concrete and the world-famous artist of colors arranged in stripes and squares under one roof.

The family business of the Liège native, which has been run for generations, operates a network of petrol stations, multi-storey car parks, car washes, grocery stores and, since 2017, the Grand Café de la Gare in the Liège-Guillemins train station in Wallonia and Brussels.

When the noble brasserie had to close temporarily during the lockdown, the descendant of Italian immigrants was sitting on the deserted terrace one fine spring day.

Uhoda watched the light falling through the horizontal grid of the roof trusses into the expanse of the station concourse.

It was an almost meditative moment, as recalled by the subtle businessman, who has built up a contemporary art collection with his brother Georges, including some works by Daniel Buren.

It came as it can in the most beautiful of all cases.

Suddenly the idea was born to let Buren's colorful room installations play on Calatrava's pale concrete.