Jean-Marc Bustamante
Photographs
Matthew Marks Gallery

Reviewed by Gus Flaubert

Jean-Marc Bustamante has been working intermittently on a series of photographic projects since 1977. His works are grouped in series based on themes of semi-urban sites around Barcelona. His color prints, taken in areas which he selected precisely because they were derelict and without interest, are derelict and without interest.

These negative landscapes of destruction are banal subjects, reminiscent of commercial advertising for local garbage dumps. Claiming no reference to specific locations or chronology, the viewer is left to wander around the gallery in the hope that the work itself will provide all the information, but it never does.

Most of the time his work is about a doomed world where knowledge is found watching television. Often there is a no-man's land with a scatologic foreground that appears as a housing unit next to a septic tank, but which actually acts as a precise clue to the importance of the work's framing and composition.

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