The French artist Claude Rutault, protagonist of a singular path with which he tried to change the rules of painting through his gaze and his will, died at the age of 80.
The news of the disappearance was published today by the Parisian newspaper “Le Figaro”, which cites as a source the famous gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin who represented the artist. Since 1973 Claude Rutault has used a new way of making art: according to the principle of “definition / method” he paints monochrome canvases and places them on walls also painted in the same color. Despite its simplicity, Rutault has obtained important awards for this unique technique that extends and dilates the work from the canvas to the entire context in which it is placed.
He has signed about six hundred unique works created thanks to galleries, collectors and institutions that have agreed to “update” a certain work of the artist. In Rutault’s conception of painting, the parameters, shape, color and positioning of the painting are limited only by the ingenuity of his commissioner in applying the rules established by his “definition / method”, whose specific permutations and consequences are not they can be controlled and could not have been fully foreseen by the artist. If the client of the work wishes to change the color of his painting, he must also change the color of the wall; if he wishes to repaint his wall, he must repaint the canvas as well to match it. His paintings have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions and presented at the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris, at Documenta in Kassel, at the Palais des beaux-arts in Brussels, at the Sydney Biennale, at the Musée de Grenoble, at the Watarium Museum. in Tokyo, at the Louvre in Paris, at the Center de création contemporaine in Tours, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.