Jean-Marc Bustamante

Jean-Marc Bustamante began his photographic work in 1978 with the series Tableaux, and moved from there into sculpture. Deliberately sticking to simple forms, well-defined themes and materials, he renews, re-enlivens the first, most basic bodily and visual relations that one experiences before a piece of art. At the same time, his work leads directly up to the present. What does it mean for us to perceive, ponder, or incorporate an image or a sculpture today? The essays in this volume, covering the work created to this date, discuss the role of photography in contemporary art, the duality of sculpture in its optical/tactile relations to the viewer's body, the ideas of landscape, architectural space, and the place of the work. Together they attempt to define the multi-form notion of "presence" formulated by Bustamante.