The Fruitmarket’s solo show of old-timer Jean-Marc Bustamante is comprised of two groups of work: early photographs and sculptures produced between 1978 and 1997, and a selection of recent pieces made in the last three years. The difference between these two groupings is perhaps the most striking thing about the show; the vividness and plasticity of Bustamante’s contemporary practice eclipses the work from the beginning of his career.
Downstairs, the exhibition opens with the former group: large scale c-prints of mundane, peripheral places which are universally still and unoccupied. Serially entitled the ‘Tableaux’ (‘pictures’), Bustamante sought to raise the status of photography in a society blindly devoted to the medium of painting. Alongside his images of earth, trees and anonymous ruins, Bustamante presents sculptures that mimic, but are not reduced to, minimalist aesthetics. ‘Bac à sable II’ is a constructed sand pit, sleek and contemporary, incongruously resting on the floor, like a cavity in the earth.
Upstairs, the recent work demonstrates Bustamante’s increasing interest in painting, although his employment of ink on plexiglass retains something of the transparency inherent to photography. The process appears simultaneously creative and restrictive, with the bright colour palette, and clumsy shapes reminiscent of computerised scribbles. The sculptures have become a simplistic variation of their predecessors; employing stencil-like ‘landscape’ shapes, crude steel, and ink with the appearance of a muddy lake.
A preoccupation with natural phenomena is consistent throughout Bustamante’s oeuvre, but his work has changed from rusticity to plasticity. To view the artist’s creative progression is a luxury. However, it is a disjointed presentation; we see the beginning and end of a thirty year artistic career, but nothing in between.
first published in the journal, 23rd february
www.journal-online.co.uk
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