Villa Medici

In the late 1970s, Jean-Marc Bustamante was one the pioneers of large colour photography along with the Düsseldorf School photographers. His work, paradoxically titled Tableaux, began a new way of creating and thinking on photography. Since the early 1980s, he has expanded his work, passing from photography, which however he has continued practicing and exhibiting, to sculpture, installation and, more recently, painting. The Peintures series is realised by scanning and blowing up small scrawls drawn with Japanese brush, on large panels of Plexiglas.
    
In the exhibition spaces of Villa Medici, conceived by Balthus in 1964, Jean-Marc Bustamante will present his first retrospective in Italy, which will also include a selection of paintings by Pieter Jansz Saenredam (oil on canvas and ink on paper), exceptionally lent by major European museums.

Saenredam is most known as the painter of Dutch churches' interiors, where the acute nudity of the spaces is sharpened by the exercise of rigorous perspectives and the appearance of geometric objects.

There is no direct relation between Jean-Marc Bustamante and Saenredam but there are some intuitive and tangible connections that the visitors of the exhibition will be able to experiment. 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 on themselves, 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 will be 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.

When he arrived at the Villa Medici, Jean-Marc Bustamante was immediately struck by the beauty of Balthus's work on the interior walls and in the loggia. Once it was decided to hold an exhibition, Bustamante chose to create works specifically for some of these "Balthus walls".

This will be the second in a series of exhibitions, based on the principle that a living artist invites 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 fact that Villa Medici's identity has been based from its beginning on fruitful connections between contemporary creation and history.

The exhibition Jean-Marc Bustamante - Villa Medici is curated by Éric de Chassey, director of the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici. A catalogue of the exhibition, with essays by Éric de Chassey and Jean-Marc Bustamante, will be edited by DRAGO.

Tuesday 14 February | 18H00 | Free entrance

INCONTRI DI FOTOGRAFIA: Jean-Marc Bustamante
MACRO - Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Roma
Auditorium via Nizza 138, Roma
Speakers:
Éric de Chassey, director of the french Academy in Rome - Villa Medici
Marco Delogu, director of FOTOGRAFIA
Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, director of MACRO

This exhibition is realized with the support of Zilli.

INFO PUBLIC
Ticket office hours: from Tuesday to Sunday 10.45 - 13.00 | 14.00 - 19.00| Thursday until 21.00. (The exhibition ticket can be bought until 30 minutes before the closure). Closed on Monday. Exceptional opening on Easter Monday.
Rates:
Entrance to Villa Medici (including the guided tour of the gardens)
9€ (full) | 7€ (reduced).
Entrance to the exhibition only
6€ (full) | 4,50€ (reduced) | 3€ up to 25 years. Free admission: children under 10.