Luz Bustamante is interested in what happens when nature is no longer an object of knowledge, but instead becomes a counterpart—an equal, capable of learning. For we live within a system of subjugation: the subjugation of nature by humans, as well as the subjugation of the feminine by the masculine (patriarchy). Her murals and oil paintings appear both surrealistic and realistic—like a limbo, a suspended state in which nothing is fixed unequivocally and in which new, resistant narratives can emerge.
Her images begin with dreams, inner narratives, or imagined scenes that she initially forms in her mind. Before developing a painting, she relates her ideas to symbolic models of thought, myths, and archaic forms of knowledge in which nature and qualities traditionally associated with the feminine are not dominated or suppressed. Theoretically, her work operates at the intersection of psychoanalysis, structuralism, and imagination studies, engaging, among others, with the ideas of Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Gilbert Durand. In her works, objects appear in unfamiliar places and unfold a precise symbolic meaning.
Opposing the (natural) body reduced to performance under capitalism, she sets free imagination. Her highly symbolically charged images do not address rationality or intellect, but rather dreams, imagination, and the unconscious—as forms of resistance to the logic of productivity imposed by capitalism. Her works can be understood as a poetic attempt to reclaim time, the body, and intimacy, and to build new bridges between humans and nature, the symbolic and the real.
