Bienvenue Monsieur Bustamante!

<strong>Jean-Marc Bustamante</strong> talks about his retrospective at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery

Feature by Adeline Amar | 15 Feb 2011

With a practice that spans painting, photography and sculpture, Jean-Marc Bustamante resists labels. “I’m interested in art,” he states candidly when asked what links the different phases of his thirty-years career. “What is art," he declares, is "how an artist can express himself to transform reality – his relationship with the world, how he can express his unique vision. Because we are unique, and we try to find a way to show something different through our own filter.”

Bustamante began as a photographer with an interest in landscapes. He mentions his first series of photographs, Tableaux, that have scenes of suburbs and transition areas. There are no characters in the photos, just landscapes that human intervention has turned into in-between spaces.

“I was quite radical at the time – I’m speaking about 1978 – because I was looking at photography as art, as an object, as a tableau, as a picture, as a photograph on the wall. It wasn’t very common back then, photography wasn’t considered an important discipline. Apart from maybe black and white.

“And I decided to use colour – big scale photographs, frame them and put them straight to the wall. It was like a statement: photography can add something to art. It’s now time we consider it as a medium with specificities, that painting or sculpture don’t have.”

When Bustamante later turned to sculpture, instead of forgetting about photography he decided to combine and confront the two in the same room. Concrete boxes and sand boxes, for instance, share a room with wall-hung photos of cypresses.

In a different room, an object that looks like a ping-pong table will no doubt startle viewers. Bustamante points at it and states: “Some sculptures are a cross between objects and sculptures. This one for instance, is it a bed, a piece of furniture? They’re not figurative sculptures, representing something. They’re more like horizontal places. The spectator can walk around it, it’s a place in itself.”

He then points out a large black and white photograph of school children dancing in a circle, one of his first photos printed on Plexiglas from the early nineties. The work is eerie, a mesmerising scene where the childrens’ shadows on the wall create a surreal atmosphere. “My work is about layers and imitations,” he adds, explaining he chose Plexiglas because of its transparency. “When you look at these pieces, you have the wall, the piece hung on the wall, and the white [in the photo] is the wall. Suddenly, you create a new space that adds this depth – an in-between photo and sculpture, in a way.”

Plexiglas has been Bustmante’s favourite material over the past decade, taking to starting works with a small scale painting that is then scanned and transferred onto a large Plexiglas sheet. He adds further changes to the piece, whether it is cutting out a piece of the Plexiglas to show the wall behind, or changing some brush-strokes of colour.

As he walks through the exhibition, Bustamante can’t hide his enthusiasm at the new Plexiglas works he made specifically for the show: “I like the energy, I like the colours!” he says, snapping his fingers in a French manner. “The initial painting is very ‘hot’, while at the end it’s more ‘frozen’. You take ‘hot’ and cool it down on the Plexiglas. It’s not so far from the idea of what a photo is: you take a photo of a reality and you freeze it.”

Born in France from an English mother, Bustamante has always kept an eye on British art, often as a way to escape the limitations of the French art world. “I like colours a lot, and British painting uses colours a lot more than the French.” He cites David Hockney’s recent iPad drawings as an example, and adds with a laugh: “French art is ‘la petite robe noire’. I’m part of the French tradition – Marcel Duchamp, ‘très’ conceptual – but I change a lot. I’ve always been very attracted to painting, but in France it’s prohibited.”

These cultural differences, however, have him delighted over his recent teaching post at Munich Art Academy (he also teaches at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris). “I’m happy in Germany. They like paintings and all my students are painters. It’s easier to be a painter there than in France.”

It's the day before his first retrospective is due to open and Bustamante is happy with the work accomplished so far; the contrast between the ground floor, showing his early works, and the upper floor displaying more recent abstract paintings. “In between the early years and the recent works a lot is missing, but I think it’s interesting for the audience to look at an artist of my age and see what he was doing at the beginning and what he’s doing now, thirty years later.”

He laughs, “Two or three years ago I did a show in London, and a critic said ‘Jean-Marc Bustamante is the most British French artist’.” Welcome home Jean-Marc.

 

Until 2 Apr

http://fruitmarket.co.uk