Who or what is Jean-Marc Bustamante? This, surely, is the question we are supposed to ask of this artist of the affectless, who has skated in his three-decade-long career across the genres – first photography, then Minimalist sculpture, then a merger of the two, and for the last few years these shockingly vivid “paintings” (I use the scare quotes intentionally) on Plexiglass.
In the late 1970s and the 1980s, Bustamante (b 1952) made his name with a long-running photographic cycle of C-prints, including the overarching Tableaux (Pictures). These were images taken on the margins, generally where urban meets rural: an unpeopled, failed suburbia of abandoned construction and empty roads. It seemed he was photographing a negative, a not-being.
In the 1980s he moved on to sculpture, focusing often on flatness, on the two-dimensionality of this three-dimensional art. His lovely Stationnaire II was a dozen boxes which held photographs of cypress trees, the trees photographed close-up and bursting the borders of the paper they were printed on, a 3D/2D, interior/exterior exploration.
Now, with these paintings, he seems to be linking the anonymity of his early photographs in their deadpan, flat style. It is hard to know what to make of them. Starting with inks and a brush, Bustamante produces small drawings (or perhaps since they are done by brush, one should call them ink-colours, instead of watercolours), which are then scanned and reproduced by computer using a screen-print process on large (150 cm x 150 cm) Plexiglass sheets.
Thus the personality of the artist is carefully removed twice – on the computer, when the hand-drawn images are simplified, and then in the industrial production process when all sense of brushstroke, artist’s hand or personality are effaced.
What is left frequently has a Pop-ish cheerfulness. Cardinal (main picture, above) uses a thin traced line to create a background depth, which is then shadowed on the white wall on which the Plexiglass hangs. A pleasant gestural line creates the memory of a bird once seen, in a Japanese-y flowing fall of colour. Landau (pictured right), too, uses its colour range in an interesting tonal development, moving from orange to yellow-green to olive.
But several other pictures fail to cohere at all, reducing simplicity well past simple to feebleness, perhaps losing their sense of purpose from the shift in scale from drawing to computer. And it's a sense of purpose that is most lacking here. The images are slick, they are frequently enjoyable, it is hard to be offended by them. Some of them make you smile. But I daresay Monsieur Bustamante feels his art has more purpose than that. It’s just hard to find it in these acrylic homages to Warholian absence.
The title of the show is Take Something Hot and Cool it Down, referring to the artist’s drawing as the “hot” element, the cooling coming from computer intervention. They are, certainly, cooled down. I don’t think, though, in the Warholian sense, they are cool.
- Jean-Marc Bustamante at the Timothy Taylor Gallery, London W1, to 21 May
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