Adam Bustamante // ‘The Birds and the Bees’ Opening reception

‘The Birds and the Bees,’ 12 paintings by Adam Bustamante, opens at the Lapis Room on May 8th–with a reception in the gallery from 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm–and runs through the 22nd of June.

In this series of portraits, he focuses our attention on the human face – that window to our souls that has always been a source of comfort, the way we recognize each other in an embarrassingly intimate way. He’s using the genre to ask questions about all of us right here, right now as we navigate our way through an Artificial Intelligence that comes pre-packaged out of a machine, infinitely reproduced and, unlike real people, immortal. His gorgeous women don’t meet our gaze. They look away as though there’s something they don’t want us to see. And they’re branded by the logo-like patterns that mark us as consumers of something we don’t quite understand. Skin surfaces dissolve into pixels. Heads break into fractals, the same image from slightly different perspectives, one flowing out of the other, all possibilities existing at once. Colors that radiate. Color that shocks. These portraits are certainly not intended to lull anyone into a false sense of complacency. Perhaps these are glimpses into an ancient past or even a not so distant future.