Jean-Marc Bustamante, Villa Medici

Jean-Marc Bustamante, Villa Medici, is the catalog for the French Academy in Rome¿s latest exhibition of the same name, on display from February 5th through May 6th, 2012. Other than the famous French artist, the exhibition and catalog are also dedicated to the Dutch painter Pieter Jansz Saenredam, known most widely for his paintings of Dutch church interiors, where the acute nudity of the spaces is sharpened by the exercise of rigorous perspectives and the appearance of geometric objects.
In 128 pages, divided by three chapters in Italian, French, and English, and 98 illustrations and photographs, the underlying motivation for Villa Medici hosting Bustamante (1952) and placing him side by side with Saenredam (1597-1665) emerges. While there is no direct relation between the two artists, there are intuitive and tangible connections that both the exhibition and catalog explore. Their works propose, each in its own way, a constant duality between documentation of what can be seen by the eye and abstract reconstruction of a place, between the distanced representation for the sake of objectivity and the aesthetic delight.

In Bustamante's works, place is always distanced: usually emptied of all human presence and closed in; they can only be perceived through a mental or physical projection. The early 1980s series titled Sites, a series of monumental steel sculptures from which two major examples are presented in the exhibition, constitutes the emblematic and programmatic formulation of this principle. It finds some outcomes in his Peintures and Trophées of the 2000s which renew and open the form of the abstract picture.

Jean-Marc Bustamante, Villa Medici is the second in a series of exhibitions, based on the principle that a living artist inviting and channeling an artist from the past. The first edition, in 2010, associated the works of Ellsworth Kelly to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres' paintings and drawings. This principle emphasizes the fruitful connections