Jacques Bautista

A creative exhibition curated by Thomas Murray and Marcus Farris

The Studio@620 welcomes “Jacques Bautista”, a creative exhibition curated by Thomas Murray and Marcus Farris which will include large format paintings, sculptural work, and video elements.  Art will be on display October 9-13, 2012 during gallery hours 12:00 – 4:00 pm daily.  An artists reception will close the show on Saturday October 13 from 6-9 PM.  Admission is free and open to the public.

Artist Statement

Our time is a time of difference. Now, perhaps more than ever, Identities are performed. We can be what we want to be. This show highlights the ideas surrounding the persona of the artist; that tendency through exacerbation and illustration. We hold the fringes of our existence. Writers, performers, craftspersons, musicians, we bring stories that expand our shared experience.

Jacques Bautista is one of those stories, an invention of a mine. An archetype, a name dropped to impress, doppelganger, shape shifter; someone we all know that everyone else should, or wish they could know. Jacques Bautista is an exhibition of interpretation. He is the Picasso I have invented. His biography is surrounded my mystery and gaps. Because, like Van Gogh, he never made it. I am making his fame for him, taking care of his afterlife, the same fate I desire for all my creations. It is about presence, about being there, in this regard I am collecting traces. The homage is really a documentation, or perhaps the opposite, the document is the homage. The idea of the trace that all artists leave behind, the objects that guarantee the afterlife is appropriated here together with the notion of attribution. In this sense what is being questioned is authorship itself, the idea that art must be associated with the proper name, with private property, ownership and value. If Bautista's oeuvre was created by other people who graciously attribute what they did to him, who is then the artist?