Tuesday, September 08, 2020

Fantastic Sculptures: Sergio Bustamente


Alejandro de la Vega et al. El Mundo de Sergio Bustamente (1989) A beautifully printed teaser-catalogue of a book, showing several of Bustamente’s eerily menacing fantasies, beautifully photographed, presented as advertisements. A lion with a human face, for example. We saw several of his pieces in a high-end shop in Matamoros, the kind that caters to tourists with money. The few works small enough to fit into a suitcase cost more than we were willing to spend, so we bought this book as a souvenir. I now think it was a wise choice: these are pieces that I would tire of quickly. There is more novelty than insight in them. They are more decorative than revelatory.
     Bustamente repeatedly riffs on the same motifs: animals with human faces, sun and moon with disturbingly realistic human faces, surreal combinations of figures, unconventional colour, detached body parts arranged in a 3-D composition, and so on. His sculptures are all meticulously crafted. Search for him online, and study the Images the search tosses up. He’s obviously successful; the text in this book is printed in five languages. ** for the art, *** for the book.


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