This 12th-Century French Church Is Reborn As a Striking New Art Foundation
Artist Jean-Marc Bustamante enlisted architect Charles Zana for his first project in Arles, transforming a deconsecrated landmark into the newly opened Fonds Bustamante
“For an architect, this is a very special challenge,” says Charles Zana, the Paris-based designer known for his elegant furniture and interiors. “A run-down building, with so much reorganization needed, its façade beaten by the sun.” The glorious opportunity of restoring a 12th-century church—l’Eglise de Sainte Croix, in the heart of the stunning and ancient southern French city of Arles—comes along rarely. And challenges apart, Zana has approached this project with clarity and care. On July 9, the deconsecrated building finally reopened as the Fonds Bustamante, a private art foundation, and Zana is thrilled. “A huge success!” he admits unreservedly.
Jean-Marc Bustamante, who has established the foundation, is a respected French artist who grew up in Toulouse and spent time in New York before settling in Paris. He now has a home and studio in Geneva, but had been planning a foundation in France for some time. “We’d found a place in Toulouse,” says the artist, “and we were all set to go. Then the mayor decided to give it to a football club.” That was ten years ago, and perhaps luck was on his side. The building in Arles could not be better suited to his needs or desires.
The city is already a place of art and culture. Maja Hoffmann’s LUMA—an arts complex covering many buildings and hectares—dominates the cultural scene, while Lee Ufan has his own foundation, and there is one dedicated to Van Gogh. Fragonard has chosen it as the location for a fashion museum. Once a year, it welcomes the definitive photography festival known as Les Rencontres d’Arles.
Bustamante’s location is next to the delightful Place de la Roquette and will play host to exhibitions, performances, symposia, and conferences. A café is yet to open, but is on the ground floor and named after his English mother, Gill. His father came from Ecuador. “They met in the south of France during the Second World War, and fell in love,” says Bustamante, who is now 74 years old.
For Bustamante, the reason for setting up a foundation was simple. “I am an artist, but I also like other artists,” he says. “At my age, my idea was not to do some kind of ego trip, but rather to do something for artists of my generation, who can easily be overlooked.” He is, however, equally committed to emerging talent, as the opening exhibition demonstrates. Having taught in Amsterdam, and at the Beaux-Arts de Paris for many years, he has always invested in the next generation.
His time as director of the Beaux-Arts—the French capital’s premier art school—from 2015 to 2018 did not end well. He was criticized for not supporting students’ allegations of sexual harassment by other teachers, a sticky end to a long career in education. This is perhaps also a riposte—a way to demonstrate a continued concern with young artists’ futures.
Charles Zana studied at the Beaux-Arts, too. “We both come from the same school,” says Zana of their connection. “Me as a student of architecture several decades ago, Jean-Marc as a professor. We speak the same language. When he asked me to work with him, I couldn’t refuse.”
Zana has made two decisive moves—to restore the strong verticality of the facades with the restoration of the pillars flanking the door; and to reinforce the horizontality of the interior. He has introduced a new contemporary entrance with a bronze and glass door—“we didn’t want to resort to pastiche”—and emptied the ground-floor space of all interventions that had been added over the years. He has also chosen colors, including a deep terracotta for the wall which rises behind Zana’s key intervention: a heroic rose terrazzo staircase. “The circulation needed to announce itself, to be different,” explains Zana of this big move; it also echoes the presence of the staircase in nearby 18th-century mansions.
The ground floor now contains the first part of the exhibition, titled “En Miroirs (In Mirrors)”, which includes work by Bustamante himself, and friends such as Rodney Graham, Cristina Iglesias, and Franz West. “I provided the drawings on the fabric, and Franz made the seat,” he says of a circular seating piece on the first floor. The Rodney Graham work shows ten fictional reworkings of the studios where the real Brothers Grimm created their books. “It was first shown in Documenta in 1991,” says Bustamante. “I showed a large red glass work there the same year.”
Much as this is a journey through Bustamante’s life, young artists also abound: among them the young Iranian Shervin Sheikh Rezaei and a former student, Clément Rodzielski, now represented by Galerie Chantal Crousel in Paris. Bustamante’s own apprenticeship was with William Klein in Paris in the 1970s—he never studied at a school. “He was not a very sympathetic man,” Bustamante says of Klein. “He was a bit of a bad boy, too. Back then it was still all about Henri Cartier-Bresson and capturing the moment. Klein was pushing the boundaries.”
Consequently, Bustamante’s first work was in that medium—some very early examples are here, including experimental printing on textiles—though he later moved across any available media, including painting on Perspex. “I only lasted a couple of years with Klein,” says Bustamante. “But he taught me to be a warrior, to do my thing.” Which is now to have his very own building in Arles.