Jean-Marc Bustamante — Exposition personnelle — Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 15 → March 5, 2016

The exhibition showcases nine unique photographic paintings representing enlarged drawings that the artist did on graph paper. These photographs of drawings printed in large format seem to induce a poetic and visual as well as a mental experience in the viewer. Similar to his past screen prints on Plexiglas, these prints on paper capture the memory of drawing and turn it into a Painting.

The only characteristics of these pictorial spaces are Bustamante’s definite lines, his focus on colour, and the carelessly brushed yellow background of each of his pieces delimited only by a blue line waving on the edges of the sheet. Though they might appear plain at first, Bustamante’s drawings are all about fragility and take up an unexpected presence and weight.

Browsing through the spectrum of almost nothing to almost everything, Jean-Marc Bustamante — in these monumental prints — continues the research on painting he begun with his first photographs. The magic of Bustamante’s work precisely lies in his use of mixed media and his quest for new worlds. This multidisciplinary approach imbues his Paintings and his body of work with a unique presence and great liberty.

Jean-Marc Bustamante lives and works in Paris. He started creating photographic paintings in 1978 and greatly contributed to the advent of photography within Fine Arts. During the four following decades, he created an innovative and varied body of work, which is now exhibited in many international collections and museums across the world- such as the Pompidou Center, the Stedelijk Museum, the Tate Modern, and the Metropolitan Museum. He took part in three Documenta and represented France at the 2003 Venice Biennale. In September 2015, he was appointed Director of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (ENSBA) in Paris.