Jean-Marc Bustamante
27 September - 9 November 2002
Galerie Sollertis
12 rue des régans F 31 000 Toulouse
tel +33 ( 0)5 61 55 43 32
fax +33 (0)5 61 25 34 13
sollertis@sollertis.com
Jean-Marc Bustamante, S.I.M. Untitled, 67 x 86 cm, colour photograph,unique, 1997
Jean-Marc Bustamante will represent France at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003.
He is one of those rare French artists who enjoy international renown, and his work has been shown in such prestigious institutions as the Jeu de Paume Gallery in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Kassel Documenta (Documenta VIII, IX and X), as well as in such “ground-breaking” venues as the Berne Kunsthalle, the Hans Lange Museum in Krefeld, and Eindhoven’s Van Abbe Museum.
He was born in Toulouse in 1952, to a South American father and an English mother, and developed an interest in photography at a very early age–in 1975 he was already working as American photographer and film-maker William Klein’s assistant.
Between 1977 and 1982, he took a whole series of photos in the Barcelona region (Tableaux/Pictures), “a region drastically altered by tourism, with its shifting urban outskirts, and its disfigured seashores”. His goal was “to find a territory in motion, where nature, culture and architecture interrelate”.
The year 1982 saw his first solo show at the Baudoin Lebon gallery in Paris. In 1983, he met the sculptor Bernard Bazile, and the two artists joined forces under the name BAZILEBUSTAMANTE, working together for the next three years. This association gave him a chance to produce three-dimensional works, and extend his praxis to media other than photography.
Jean-Marc Bustamante has produced a work especially for Le Printemps de Septembre [Spring September] (commissioned by the Centre national des arts plastiques [CNAP], Paris), which will be on view in the Réfectoire des Jacobins, in Toulouse.
In tandem with this event, the Sollertis gallery will be showing a selection of works from the series Something is Missing, which the artist embarked upon in 1995. Something is Missing is a “kind of anti-logbook”, consisting of travel photos taken in the United States, Argentina and Spain.
“Something is Missing, which should be regarded as one and the same work being gradually constructed before our eyes, comes across as isolated blocks which can be made up of up to twelve photographs. These blocks do not narrate any story, nor do they prompt any specific kind of reading. They are archipelagos–or, alternatively, islands, when they are made up of just a single image” (Jean-Pierre Criqui in Jean-Marc Bustamante, oeuvres photographiques 1978-1999, CNP).
