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A RETURN TO GRACE

By Éric de Chassey

For a long time, Jean-Marc Bustamante was not a painter. He was a photographer and a sculptor. At the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, he had made his mark by creating large scale photographs he called Tableaux [Pictures], a title that emphasized the fact that they assumed, albeit in a different medium, all the characteristics of the Western tradition of easel painting: depiction of a specific place, color and line composition, address to a situated viewer, emphasis on subject-matter rather than object-matter, etc. He also made sculptures and installations, …