The images in the Barcelona Series could be defined as time capsules circulating in different but perceptible orbits. They are all specific scenes, setting out to turn the image into an object and revolving around a theoretically secondary theme such as air or light. These examples of what the artist means by ‘tableaux’ are the expression of particular states. This time, Barcelona and its outskirts serve as a setting for the artist to show the quality of urban spaces “without qualities”. These can be transitory spaces like crossroads: places where something has happened or will happen and where there is a subtle game between reality, fiction and verisimilitude.

Regarding places as the sites people create for themselves in the world to affirm their existence, Jean-Marc Bustamante defines a familiar place which is unknown and somehow enigmatic at the same time by removing it from the surroundings to which it belongs. The edges of the work (and by analogy the limits of our field of vision) are shown through frames, delineations and pronounced contours. These are examples of the artist’s search for the capacity to experience which can still be lived in immediacy, with no conceptual approach or further comment and which we can understand not so much as memories or testimonies, but as an issue in themselves.