Claude Rutault

L'Almanach 16 : Claude Rutault

When in 1973 Claude Rutault repainted his kitchen walls and inadvertently covered a painting, it dawned on him that a canvas and its wall were cohabitating in a relationship that was far from being neutral. 

The artwork titled À l’adresse, permanently installed on the façade of the Consortium Museum building (whose collection it belongs to) is made in its present state of 88 canvases in various sizes, painted with the same white color as the wall that hosts them. It is a kind of “store” of canvases which can be used “elsewhere” to implement their presentation, which is generally based on the “definitions – methods” invented by the artist beforehand. 

Leaving the façade wall, they are then replaced with small canvases that are all the same size, imitating museum placeholders for outgoing loans and painted the same color as the one layered over the canvas that will be displaced “elsewhere”  in a new arrangement. No canvas however can be permanently removed from the matrix. 
In the context of the exhibition L' Almanach 16, seven canvases have been subjected to a removal. The choice of their number and their surface was determined by the reconstitution, through their grouping in the install, of the objective surface of a frameless painting by Auguste Pointelin positioned exactly across on the opposite wall among other paintings by the artist. The decision to paint two walls blue in the same room was a subjective choice motivated by formal considerations.
— Xavier Douroux

Claude Rutault was born in 1941 in Trois-Moutiers, he lives and works in Vaucresson.