Jean-Marc Bustamante

In his first solo show in London since “Something is Missing” at the Tate’s Art Now space in 1998, Jean-Marc Bustamante (born 1952, Toulouse) will be exhibiting works from his latest “L P” series of photographs, taken in the area around the Swiss lakes, along side his sculpture.  By placing these visually stunning landscapes in the same space as his vitrines and paintings on plexiglass, Bustamante demonstrates his fascination with the “experience of vision” that links them.
 
The new “L P” series are large format photographs with a massive scale. A dramatic perspective is created, by the attendant sensation of looking downwards into a lake-side garden or upwards from beneath bramble thickets and mountainous peaks. It is a detached vision that finds fascination with every aspect of a landscape caught in a transitory moment of time.
 
Bustamante is interested in capturing fleeting moments in time within a permanent object. This obsession is prevalent in the steel and glass vitrine, Aquarama 1, which operates as “an aquarium where liquidity and fixity co-exists”. Similarly, the painting “Never-the-less” from the Panorama series captures the painterly and transitory so that it is made permanent, and in the artist’s words “fossilised”, behind heavy plexiglass that is bolted to the wall.
 
Bustamante’s selection of the four works in the show, though seemingly diverse, create a discourse with each other: “Each piece forms, like a landscape or a world at a time, complexity, and the possibility to be read at different levels – they are sensual, mental, cool and warm at the same time…”
 
Integral to Bustamante’s artistic practice is his interest in the distance of vision, and the viewer’s point of view in completing a piece: “I have no intention of either producing new images or creating new forms. The work must not put anything in order; it must bring about a new situation. Above all it must be proof of the existence of the person looking at it, who in turn is responsible for his relation with it.”
 
With a widely acclaimed international career that has included representation in documenta 8, 9 and 10, the artist has had solo exhibitions in many major institutions, including the Tate in 1998.