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9/1/2012

Jonathan Lasker - Jean-Marc Bustamante

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac - Marais, Paris

Jonathan Lasker
Recent Paintings

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is delighted to announce its fifth exhibition of Jonathan Lasker’s work. The American artist will present ten new paintings, six of which are large format and four of which are medium format.

Born in 1948 in Jersey City, Lasker studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He continued his studies at the California Institute of Arts (CalArts), located just outside of Los Angeles. During the ‘70s, the school was a bastion of young conceptual artists who had a tendency to dismiss painting as a naïve pursuit and a lifeless art.

Jonathan Lasker, an ardent believer in the vitality of painting as a medium for artistic expression, rebelled against the pervasiveness of conceptual art. He was inspired by two of his professors, Richard Artschwager and Susan Rothenberg, amongst others. He gives new breath to painting by introducing basic pictorial elements such as lines, colours, and (often monochrome) textures. He uses the vocabulary handed down from minimalist painters, such as Frank Stella, Brice Marden, and Robert Ryman.

Lasker developes a formal language. He treats the canvas as a zone where strokes of paint are superposed atop one another in a way that is tangible. The marks, often an assemblage of primary or secondary colours, are distinguished one from another through Lasker’s bright, intense, and sharply contrasting colour choices. The colours create fluidity or, conversely, pathways that embed themselves physically into the material, with paint building up along the edges. This sense of impasto, or of fluidity, gives the impression of very different temporalities that in turn shape the way the tableau is interpreted. Lasker’s compositions are controlled and structured; they oscillate between intuition and analysis. Lasker seeks a pictorial system that justifies itself. He brings the viewer to the brink of instant reflex, identifying with the image represented.

The titles of his tableaux are worthy of consideration: The Boundary of Luck and Evidence, Life Without Thought, and Illusions of the Self. The titles underline the parallels that the artist draws between the dialectical nature—as well as the physical nature—of his marks upon the canvas, like an abstract juxtaposition of words.

Lasker’s work has been shown recurrently in the United States and in Europe since the ‘80s: at the ICA in Philadelphia, the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington DC, the Kunsthalle Bielefeld and Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1997-1998). He participated in Documenta in 1992 in Kassel. In 2003, the Reina Sofia in Madrid dedicated a major retrospective to Lasker’s work, and as did the K-20 Kunstsammlung Nord Westphalia in Düsseldorf.

His work is also represented amongst the best collections all over the world, from the MoMA and the Whitney Museum in New York to the Eli Broad Foundation in Los Angeles. In Europe, his work is included amongst the collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

A catalogue, featuring an interview with Jonathan Lasker by Marion Daniel, will be published in honour of this exhibition.

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Jean-Marc Bustamante
Square Paintings

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works on square screen-reprinted Plexiglas by French artist, Jean-Marc Bustamante. This new body of work, titled Colorito-Colorado, refers to the Renaissance era during which the determining characteristic of the Venetian school was colour, rather than drawing. Unlike disegno [drawing], which Florentine artists regarded as the key to depicting nature, Venetian artists preferred to achieve form by applying the paint directly in layers – thus, in a way, anticipating the Impressionists.

This series demonstrates Bustamante's endeavour to gain an understanding of colour-painting. The explosion of colour on Plexiglas originates in expansive drawing or applying large strokes and patches of colour with felt pen on graph paper. The drawing is transformed and simplified through computer-processing, which removes everything that records the temporality of the action – the contact of the brush-strokes, the layering of the paint, the movements of the artist's hand. Far removed from any relation to traditional techniques, this is a new kind of painting, reminiscent of the brightly coloured images we are used to seeing on our computer or iPad screen. As the artist expresses it, we gain "spirit", lightness, simplicity – and probably also speed and fluency of perception.

The image thus produced is transformed into a large screen-printed Plexiglas picture. The use of industrial processes has been a constant factor in Bustamante's work over the past three decades; it began with photography, continued with sculpture and finally led in the '90s to Lumières, his first works on Plexiglas.

This industrial aesthetic, so important to Bustamante, was inherited from painters such as Franz Kline, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol; now that we are surrounded with technical equipment in everyday life, it assumes quite a different significance. It also shows the interest of artists for technology (i.e. Albert Oehlen's ink-jet works, or David Hockney's iPhone paintings). In his approach to painting, the artist no longer leaves the Plexiglas free-floating on the wall held by four metal brackets, but places the picture in a steel frame, giving it the appearance of a window full of colour and transparency. The white wall illuminates the painting, at the same time excluding the possibility of conveying depth or infinity.

Interestingly enough, this glass box is reminiscent of a large-format camera, and thus recalls the artist's earlier works. Although the lens is a leitmotiv throughout Bustamante's work, this series aims at a new kind of painting and at a new way of looking at pictures.

Bustamante lives and works in Paris. He participated in Documentas 8, 9 and 10, and designed the French pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale.

Jean-Marc Bustamante has an important solo exhibition opening on February 5, 2012 at the Villa Medici in Rome (running until May 6, 2012). A catalogue will be published on the occasion, with texts by Eric de Chassey, Director of the Académie de France in Rome - Villa Medici and Jean-Marc Bustamante.

Opening on Tuesday, Januar y 10 th from 7pm to 9pm

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
7, rue Debelleyme Paris
Hours: tue-sat 10am-7pm
Admission free

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