Jane Lombard Gallery is pleased to present The Colour of Words, our first solo exhibition with Jane Bustin, following a successful two-person show in 2017. The London-based artist is recognized for her intimate and minimalist constructions. Bustin’s earthen neutral works are made by applying natural pigment to porcelain, fabric, or wood. She cultivates a poetic dialogue between the disparate materials. The exhibition includes paintings, film, and porcelain objects.

Jane Bustin was the recipient of a residency award at the Mark Rothko Centre, in Latvia, during the summer of 2019. In the former 1833 Fortress just outside of the city of Daugavpils, Bustin describes a richness of “histories, secrets, and buried memories within its walls” where she made her studio. Situated in a brooding outbuilding that once housed a dining hall for Napoleonic soldiers, a prisoner of war camp, a post-war aviation engineering school and underground raves in the 1980s. The strangeness and beauty of Bustin’s surroundings compelled an intensive study of her quarters. She suggests the space itself entranced her and directed her practice in those weeks and beyond.

The artist transmutes crumbling walls, sun bleached paint, and a gentle breeze in this new series, which begets a reflection on a structural and emotional absorption of time. A particularly striking remembrance of color is displayed in the works, she recounts the intensity of these shades in her encounters and grounds us in her experience through a sensory rich description of each one.

An exhibition highlight, Bergotte’s Yellow, is a work in response to Marcel Proust’s well-known  passage from his epic novel, In Search of Lost Time. Bergotte, the fictional writer, fixates on Vermeer’s View of Delft painting. The writer suddenly has a revelation that “this little patch of yellow wall” is a wondrous, magical element that lifts the ordinary into the extraordinary. Bustin’s thirteen-foot painting consists of two panels, one made of anodized aluminum and the other of linen. The additional materials include hand-dyed, burnt saffron silk, a stainless steel stand, paper, and a glazed porcelain bowl. The chemical transformations echo Proust’s divine alchemy, turning the everyday into the precious.

Yellow

Walking the length of the wall, we witness “le Petit pan de mur Jane,” Bergotte’s yellow enlightenment, that type of astonishment when we realise something so obvious, so missed, so imperfectly perfect in its beauty, we stare in disbelief as we realise we have spent most of our lives missing it. Vermeer with his outstretched arm knew a thing about light and Proust the master of a missed opportunity.

— Jane Bustin

Brown

Even the notebook from Rimi is brown, the bed sheets are brown, the curtains are charcoal grey, the wood is walnut and the light only comes across diagonally from the corner window.

Is it a cell? a special Rothko cell? womb like, warm, dense and dark.

The kind of darkness that comes from within, when you wake at night and your heart drops to your stomach for no apparent reason.

— Jane Bustin

Green

Virago’s tears, viridian green, a female warrior or sufferer of foiled vanity, even her tears of failure are illuminated, for failures are precious, selfless acts displaying small neon warning signs.

— Jane Bustin

White

The egg man came today, his van was white, he wore beige, he handed me white foods, titanium white eggs, ivory white yogurt, zinc white cottage cheese. I put them on the pale Davy’s grey table, white goods from the east, so proud of its paleness and whiteness.

— Jane Bustin

Red

In this place (not that place) this place that deep rusty, russet crying red, not what lies beneath the skin, but that spills and stubbornly stays insisting on itself letting you know, it’s Mark. A promise of a past, a sign that spat life out, scratching itself amongst closed doors –

I wants to stay until it burns from oxide red, to deep maroon through to darkest burnt umber, where it hums at the very base of your heart refusing to move, refusing to leave and just as that ox’s blood bled onto leather, staining a skin of one dead animal to another, we are all touched by these unknown dyed finger tips.

— Jane Bustin