José Leonidas Bustos
(-formé Series)

José Leonidas Bustos

Original for sale · sales (at) almario (dot) ca

José Leonidas Bustos holds a master's degree in procedural law and a specialization in philosophy of law and legal theory from the Universidad Libre. A specialist in criminal sciences, he was a doctoral candidate in legal sociology and political institutions at the Universidad Externado, and also holds a master's degree in law from the Universidad Nacional.

His professional career combined independent practice and academia: director of the criminal law department at the Universidad Libre, where he coordinated the workshop on crime scene management and the certificate on the new criminal prosecution system.

Bustos served as a magistrate of Colombia's Supreme Court of Justice from 2008 to 2016.

In the years that followed, his own trajectory was reversed. Declared unworthy by the Colombian Senate and sentenced to ten years in prison in the "cartel de la toga" judicial corruption scandal, he today flees justice, exiled in Canada, the country where the artist himself found refuge.

His portrait, a photomosaic of 4,800 images of the family's destroyed home, of the cell where the artist's father was held, and of the home at the time of the arrest, was created for déformé and destroyed by a machine over the course of the exhibition at Galerie l'OEuvre de l'Autre (Chicoutimi, 2013). One production, one destruction. Five years later, the same face returned, rebuilt in jam labels, in his Marmelade portrait.

Photomosaic of 4,800 printed photographs, pinned by hand on plexiglass (4,800 pins), approx. 75 × 150 cm (30 × 60 in).