Opening Saturday, January 14, 2006, 6-8pm

The Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris is pleased to present new work by Jean-Marc Bustamante in an exhibition entitled Perfect Dreams.

The French artist will present six mural works titled Perfect Dreams as well. In this series, the artist creates relief sculptures with a great economy of means. These ‘sérigraphiées’ platforms, with haphazard lines, whose colours are often saturated and tense, leap from the wall, whose presence provides a backdrop to reveal the images, like a negative held up to the light. This technique effectively expresses the conceptual relationship that Bustamante strives, like a tightrope walker, to weave and pursue, between photography and drawing, between paint and space. He creates a world in suspension, surging, unstable and strident. These very personal pieces become spaces, for the most part encased in firm structures: steel hand cut frames, sliced opensteel grating.

He will also show a large triptych in the same vein as the panoramas as well as two new plexi glass pieces, which are cut out in the centers and at the edges.

Employing all these paradoxes and visual traps, are not only ways to create the works, the use of colour, at once opaque and reflective, serves to make the viewer explore his fragility, his doubts. This yearning to put the world in perspective, a grand project that the artist has been pursuing for over 20 years, finds here a just and poetic conclusion.

This exhibition will be a prelude to the exhibition Beautiful Days that Jean-Marc Bustamante will inaugurate at the end of January at the Kunsthaus of Bergenz in Austria. The artist will show new works, monumental sculptures and create special lighting for the building itself, built by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor.

Jean-Marc Bustamante was born in 1952, he was quickly lauded, as early as 1977, for his first large -scale colour, photographic works. These works, helped once and for all to establish photography as a true art form. The artist then continued developing his ideas through a variety of mediums. He participated in three Documenta (1987, 1992, 1997). He exhibits regularly in Europe, the United States and in Japan. He represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2003.