Overview
Bustamante in this new work expresses his continued interest in the conceptual relationship between painting, drawing, sculpture and photography.
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante entitled Perfect Dreams.
This is the first major body of new work since the artist won the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2003. Perfect Dreams are a series of six new serigraphy wall works which juxtapose the idea of a monochrome Plexiglas field, inscribed by drawing which is registered as empty space on the color plane. The white wall behind creates a third dimension behind these reliefs which are again framed in jagged edged hand-cut steel framed boxes. These serigraphy platforms, are set off by the apparently haphazard lines of the drawings, whose colors are saturated and tense. The animated presence of these works seems to leap from the wall toward the viewer.
Bustamante in this new work expresses his continued interest in the conceptual relationship between painting, drawing, sculpture and photography. His works hover between sculpture and painting. These Perfect Dreams exist in a suspension of time, surging, unstable and strident. The exhibition also includes a large triptych in the same vein in which the drawing inscribed suggests a landscape of deep space, and two smaller new Plexiglas pieces that are minimal forms, with curvy edges and oblong negative spaced cut-out.
This new body of work fits directly into Bustamante's continuing project of trying to put the world into perspective. Enjoying a series of paradoxes and visual traps his works use color that is both opaque and reflective, serving to implicate the viewer to share in this process of uncovering the innate doubts and fragilities that affect the human condition.
This exhibition is a prelude to the upcoming museum show Beautiful Days at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria that opens at the end of January and runs through 19 March. The artist will show two new monumental sculptures and create a site-specific light piece on the outside of the much acclaimed concrete museum built by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor in 2001.
Jean-Marc Bustamante was born in 1952 in Toulouse. As early as 1977 he was quickly lauded for his first large scale colour photographic works. During the next decades the artist continued to develop his ideas through a combination of mediums. He has participated in three Documentas (1987,1992,1997). He exhibits regularly in Europe, the United States and Japan. He represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2003.
