The new home for the Fonds Bustamante, the Eglise Saint-Croix, a deconsecrated 12th-century church in Arles, has been many things: a stop on the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route, a private home, a spa, and now an art foundation for French artist Jean-Marc Bustamante.
Tour the Fonds Bustamante’s new home
At 74, Bustamante has a career spanning photography, painting and sculpture. He represented France at the São Paulo Biennale in 1994 and the Venice Biennale in 2003, and was director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris for four years. He has long been thinking about this project, including an aborted effort eight years ago to create it in his hometown of Toulouse (at the last minute, the city commandeered the building for a football club). When the church came up for sale in Arles, he jumped at it.
Arles presents a unique challenge, as it is home to a number of excellent art foundations as well as the annual Rencontres d'Arles photography festival. 'We have to do a good job,' says the tall, silver-maned Bustamante. 'Because we're going to be judged. People will say, “What have they brought that's new?"'
To renovate the church, he hired architect Charles Zana, whose work on the CAB foundation in Saint-Paul de Vence he admired. Zana gutted the building and did the job in only 18 months, keeping the building's historical integrity while adding a contemporary feel.
And though his intervention is subtle, he says it was a major undertaking: 'There were many scars from the past.' As to the exercise of turning a church into an art space, Zana found it natural. 'It's easier to make an art foundation in a place of worship than a nightclub. There's a silence that's similar in both places, and even a way of walking, whether looking at art or stained glass.'
The entrance is now a monumental door in bronze-coloured metal, with moucharabieh-like latticework. Inside, Zana kept traces of the stone walls and arches that had survived the years. He references the building's ecclesiastical past with a long nave-like axis on the ground floor, leading to a stairway at the end. Exposed white corrugated aluminium on the ceilings emphasises the architect's hand while reminding visitors that this was once an open space.
The exhibition rooms, spread over three floors, are in neutral shades of stone and concrete. Zana used warmer tones in the dramatically lit stairwell, with terrazzo stairs crafted by local artisans, and terracotta paint on the walls, colours which remind him of the nearby Camargue. Bustamante added a strip of enamelled lava tiles to the building's façade, choosing yellow in a nod to Vincent Van Gogh, the city's most famous former resident.
Bustamante means for the foundation to ensure his own legacy and also to support that of his peers, notably European artists from the 1980s onward. 'I lived through a very important time, between avant-gardistes and the end of the avant-garde,' he says. 'I don't want the artists of that tradition to be forgotten, and I think that today, memories are very short.'
To help with that task, he created a supervisory board and scientific committee of important figures from the art world. The inaugural exhibition, titled 'En Miroirs', features his work in dialogue with artists he's exhibited or worked with over the past 40 years, all friends or former students.
In the nave, PSSST GOD is a series of monochrome paintings by Gerhard Merz, a German painter born in 1947. Bustamante says, 'With monochrome, we arrive at the end of painting. He is no longer dealing with art history; he is dealing with God.' The first floor features a stunning double-height gallery, where the Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias created a large cast aluminium and glass sculpture especially for the space. It sits near a sculpture by Franz West and a photograph of an upside-down tree by Rodney Graham.
Another gallery includes an abstract painting by a former student, Alice Anderson, made while she danced a performance with a microwave oven. It hangs beside Bustamante's 1977 photograph of a house being built in Spain, what he calls a 'photographic painting', showing the world under construction at a certain moment in time.
On the top floor, an apartment with a spectacular view will be an artist's residence, as Bustamante plans for the foundation to be active year-round with exhibitions, masterclasses and symposiums. And the street-level café with its cobblestoned terrace is sure to be a hit with locals.