Jean-Marc Bustamante at Matthew Marks - photography and sculpture exhibition

Jean-Marc Bustamante, who will represent France in this year's Venice Biennale, recently exhibited nine enormous photographs and 10 sculptures at Matthew Marks. The show was a hodgepodge of objects taken from a variety of series that he's been working on for the last two years. Bustamante is an enormously talented photographer whose eye for classical composition and color is extraordinary.

The sumptuous, mostly vertical photographs from the "L.P." and "T" series, shot in Switzerland in 2000 and Japan in 2001, respectively, demonstrate his continued interest in suburban marginal spaces. Since the 1970s, he has pursued semi-suburban landscapes that are nonesthetic and banal: building sites, roads, bridges, prefab architecture, cemeteries and algae-ridden pools, all placed before the grandeur of mountaintops or the cool calm of a river. The sense of awe often provoked by traditional landscape images is replaced by the deliberate detachment or indifference Bustamante professes. As he explained in 2001, he is attempting to make "unimpressive works" and an "art without qualities," not sublime images but pictorial ones replete with the countless details afforded him by his large-format 8-by-10-inch camera.

The two images that represent the most significant departure are both titled T.C.B. and dated 2002. They offer an up-close view of a life-size, red-blue-and-white clad young woman in an overgrown ravine before a chain-link fence. Her indifferent gaze meets ours in each instance. The woman wears the colors of the French flag, a motif Bustamante often employs. But otherwise these works are a divergence from his practice because humans have never before been his focus; in the past, when people were visible in his work, they were generally tiny supplements to a vast landscape. Insofar as these two images don't fit into his oeuvre of landscape imagery, one wonders if they are anomalous or represent a new direction. Either way, they create a conceptual tension in the show and, as such, are among the more interesting images on view.

Examples from Bustamante's "Panorama" series of colorful wall sculptures are the weakest of the works on view. While seemingly spontaneous, action-filled compositions, they are made by silk-screening enlarged photographic copies of small gestural drawings onto Plexiglas. One wonders if their meaning lies in reducing landscape's emphatic concreteness to an abstract artifact. At least that way they would make sense within the context of this show.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group