March of approvals

Jean-Marc Bustamant at the Catherine Cultural Foundation

As part of the Year of Russia - France, Muscovites saw a large personal exhibition of the famous European artist Jean-Marc Bustamante. The vernissage at the Ekaterina Foundation on Kuznetsky Most was held with great fanfare. Among the French guests, in addition to the master Bustamante, revered in his homeland, was also the director of the Paris Pompidou Center Alfred Pakman, whose article opens the exhibition catalogue.

Bustamante's art can be confusing. Perhaps many Russians will not understand or accept him. We love sweeping, clear artistic gestures and thick texture. To make it juicy. And here the halls are populated with objects, images that don’t seem to convince with their novelty and don’t even want to please. In one room, for example, large photographic images of the crowns of tall cypress trees are combined with copper steles placed around the hall, reminiscent of either tombstones or park benches. In another room, pieces of polyvinyl chloride lie on half-rolled, half-rolled carpets. At the end hangs a huge plexiglass screen, on which a reproduction from a magazine with a view of the pavilion of the 1955 Milan exhibition on the fight against harmful insects is applied with typographic ink using screen printing. In a black and white picture with shadows layered on top of each other, some silhouettes of visitors, mirrors, a corridor, and huge caterpillars in shop windows float. What's on the floor is called "Continents". What is in the display case is “Light 14 92 ABC” (the numbers in this case indicate the series number and the year of creation - 1992). In the halls you can also see abstract paintings on plexiglass, random photographs of girls, rockers and hockey players pulled from the Internet and bleached, geometric objects made of wood and metal - simple and artless, like modules of a future furniture set.

Visitors are scratched by this artlessness. The recognition of individual thematic lines is also straining. The sculpture, with its abstract modules and mirrors, is somewhat reminiscent of the ascetic Arte Povera (the “poor art” that emerged in Italy in the late 1960s, favored by Germano Celant and Michelangelo Pistoletto). Photographs with a deliberately random composition, reproductions from old magazines, Internet images enlarged into frescoes correlate with conceptual and post-conceptual practice. The colored spots, stripes and strokes on the plexiglass are similar to a new edition of abstract expressionism, minimalism, or even (if you consider that handwriting is based on a felt-tip pen) to Art Brut.

Each element separately is perceived as a truism, a banality, something that is seen somewhere and repeats something. However, overall the exhibition is attractive and enjoyable. First of all, precisely because he doesn’t want to be liked. Alfred Pakman remembered Bustamante’s favorite novel by Robert Musil, “The Man Without Qualities.” It is this “non-property” that problematizes the mode of existence of modern man. Probably, for Bustamante, its positive aspect is important, formulated by Dmitry Zatonsky in an article about Musil’s work: the properties are not frozen within the boundaries of the individual, concrete, deadly serious, but allow you to enjoy the “sense of possibility”, to be “in a state of permanent act of creation”.

The images of Jean-Marc Bustamante are the patterns from which the universal art communication with the world is designed. The French analyst Bustamant builds from his opuses coherent series “Light”, “Landscapes”, “Panoramas”... And these systems create an interesting catalog of options for the artistic interpretation of everyday life without dogmatically following accepted methods, styles, genres, even types of creativity, but in their mobile, glittering interpermeability.

Sergei KHACHATUROV