Claude Rutault “A Proposal to Peter Nadin”

Off Paradise

[Image: Claude Rutault "A Proposal to Peter Nadin" (1979) realized 2022]

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Off Paradise presents Claude Rutault, A Proposal to Peter Nadin, a project forty-three years in the making, based on a proposal, or “protocol,” given by Rutault, one of the most important French artists of his generation and a pioneer of Conceptualism, to fellow artist Nadin in June 1979.

A Proposal to Peter Nadin is one of the rare, if not unique, occurrences in Rutault’s oeuvre of a protocol being addressed to a specific individual instead of to a nameless “charge-taker.” The protocol begins, “As the person in charge of a space, Peter Nadin, will have, for each exhibition, to take a certain number of decisions.”

The proposal was never realized and has remained a text in Rutault’s archive to this day, more than four decades later.

Claude Rutault (b. 1941) is a painter who does not touch paint or canvas.

Instead, over a career of more than half a century, he has issued sets of painting instructions to others — curators, collectors or institutions — who become his “charge-takers.” These protocols, or “de-finitions/methods,” as he has called them since 1973, guide his works, without themselves being works.

“I write paintings,” Rutault says.

In a nod to the 43 years since Rutault presented him with the protocol, Peter Nadin (b. 1954) has made the decision to realize it by painting a single canvas 42 times over, plus one.