Claude Rutault — Actualités de la peinture — Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 12 → November 9, 2013

“My paintings have a short life, but they have several lives.”

Claude Rutault’s work uses a set of rules that was established in 1973 in de-finition/method 1:

“A canvas braced on a stretcher, painted the same colour as the wall on which it is hung. All commercially available formats can be used, whether rectangular, square, round or oval.”

The identity of the canvas colour with the wall has led to development of a corpus of approximately 580 de-finition/methods. Rutault’s texts form the instructions for an evolving work that is ‘actualized’ by its “charge-taker” — the collector or museum, for example.

Since 1995, in keeping with the logic of abandoning the finished object, Claude Rutault has repainted all the paintings he did before those painted the same colour as the wall. He has added breadth to his statement by using the canvases beyond the strict relationship of wall to canvas. Canvases are stacked, placed on the floor or leant up against the walls.

The exhibition actualités de la peinture brings together some twenty artworks in three sets evoking the stages of a work’s life, from the workshop to the gallery . The composition of Vermeer’s L’Atelier, also known as L’Art de la peinture, is suggested through the vocabulary of de-finition/methods. The second offering hinges on Nicolas Poussin’s Saisons. Two series of original engravings of the four pictures are used. For the first of these the engravings are painted the same colour as the wall (as was the case at the Centre de Vassivière and then at the Musée de Nancy). For the second series, each engraving is placed on a stack of canvases with a different coloured glass placed on each pile. The last room contains a version of Watteau’s L’Enseigne de Gersaint. Nicolas Watteau conceived this monumental work in 1720 as a shop sign for the gallerist Gersaint. In this exhibition, Claude Rutault surrounds the engraving with a dense hanging of a dozen autonomous de-finition/methods. This painting is intensified by giving a contemporary feel to Watteau’s original statement.