Jean-Marc Bustamente
A world at a time
Info
Jean-Marc Bustamante, born in Toulouse in 1952, is a young artist with an established reputation. Nevertheless ‘A WORLD AT A TIME’ in the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg is only his second one-man show in German. Over the years Jean-Marc Bustamante has produced a complex oeuvre which goes far beyond prefabricated theories and systems. Since 1977 he has been expressing his view of the world in large photographs. Concurrently, he developed sculptures which address places and sites an the body’s absence there. In these works a significant theme is the association of conceptual, abstract ’space’ with the real-life space of nature and architecture.
The Wolfsburg exhibition demonstrates the transformation process of an intangible place, a non-place, into a manifest, experienceable space. For Wolfsburg and it’s new museum this is to be understood in terms both metaphorical and concrete – with regard to the building. Conversely, though, the works only become tangible in the given space.
Jean-Marc Bustamante sees the big exhibition hall in the Wolfsburg museum as ‘a challenge’. It provides him with his first opportunity to install his three large floor-pieces, ‘Sites I, II and III’ (1991/92) in a space. By ’site’ he also means a place’s historical context. Each piece is roughly 5 x 5 meters and weighs more than 2,5 tons. Made of steel, the sculptures were welded and then given a coat of anti-oxidant red lead paint. This primer is meant to accentuate the in-between state of the sculptures: they are not unworked, but they are not finished either. They posess the character of a model, a fence, suggesting the boundaries of architecture. The poles lying on ‘Site III’, however, they are material from which a building has yet to be constructed.
This is the first show of works by a contemporary artist in the big museum hall, and an acid test for the sculptures. Will they put up a fight and defend their autonomy, or is the hall a whale which will devour the sculptures as if they were so much plankton?
Jean-Marc Bustamante confronts the solid steel sculptures with eleven cibachromes which he calls ‘Tableaux’, the name he gives to all his photographic works. The series of large photographs were taken near Barcelona 1991. Vertical cypresses, in dark, heavy oak frames measuring 1,60 x 1,40 meters, seem to advance from the wall, almost three-dimensional in appearance.
The third group of works consists of sculptures which are only a few months old: ‘Des Arbres de Noel’ (Christmas Trees). They are blend of organic and geometrical shapes. As in all of Bustamante’s recent work, the outline is more significant, obviously based on a drawing. Unlike the large, floral shape on the floor which was shown at documenta IX, and covered with a homogeneous coat of paint, he treated the surface of the 2,5 meter tall treees in a much freer style. The several layers of paint suggest a painterly approach, while the sharp-tipped phallic form reveals a more brutal, aggressive side of his works.
The exhibition displays a wide spectrum of the artist’s output, his treatment of architectural, sculptural, photographic, drawing and painting elements.
‘Although my works sometimes look cold, I actually have a highly developed relationship towards matter, towards earth, towards steel, towards concrete, towards the places… I do not perform any calculations to make my sculptures look as though they are in balance, but the sensitive, poetic character of the pieces, their analytical dimensions, give them an equilibrium, a formal balance with regard to the story. … I am not particularly interested in the form of my sculptures. That is not what I am looking for. What I do want is to change the relationship between the work of art and the beholder. The work no longer takes the lead, it no longer instructs. It must first supply proof of the existence of the person who is looking at it and who assumes equal responsibility for the work’.