JEAN RUSTIN

In the mid-60s, the first signs of the figuration to come emerged. Rustin used an increasingly recognisable symbolic language. The geometric shapes became clearer, and pieces of the body began to emerge in a space that was still abstract: an eye, a pair of breasts, buttocks, or even mouths would gradually intrude into the painting. He mastered this interplay of shapes and colours to perfection, and the public responded well.

The end of the 60s saw the artist's first disillusions manifest themselves in his painting. For a short time, his paintings were filled with signs that were clearly evocative of a system whose cogs were seriously beginning to creak. The political and social events of the late 60s led Rustin to completely lose whatever illusions he had left about a harmonious future. The paintings of this period clearly convey the idea of an infernal machine whose frightening capacity to crush the individual Rustin sensed. Rustin stepped back from the upheavals shaking the world. After a few canvases expressing social unrest, Rustin, in a kind of complete withdrawal from any political commitment, made a U-turn.

Remaining within his mechanical vocabulary and never letting go of the violent feeling that inhabits his painting, he gradually refocused on the meanders of impulsive life. In this way, he turned inwards, releasing an explosive array of images on canvas that went beyond the violence of the social sphere to focus on the private sphere, where the relational and sexual dimensions were central.

In 1971, Rustin exhibited his work at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The 150 canvases displayed before his eyes came as a huge shock: all the violence that the painter wanted to embody in his painting suddenly seemed like a sterile chaos of shapes and colours. Although the exhibition was a public success, it was a real catastrophe for the painter, whose lucidity in no way allowed him to deny it. He saw himself under the influence of a whole range of movements in vogue at the time, from American pop art to abstract expressionism and the whole Cobra vein. From then on, there was only one thing to do: start all over again, on the basis of tattered ideals.

he violence that inhabits Rustin (and the world around him) will then have to be expressed differently: Rustin will understand that the important thing is to return to gravity, and that this return will first be achieved by constructing a concrete space, with its limits: a horizon line is drawn on the canvas and the fragmented bodies that were floating at random will suddenly find themselves subject to gravity. It was a radical decision, but it wasn't going to be applied to the canvas all at once. Rustin will search for his painting, making it emerge step by step. The space becomes the room, the bodies are on the floor. Then came portraits of women with rosy cheeks, contorting themselves, playful, provocative and lascivious, in an atmosphere of muted eroticism. The bodies were powerfully evocative, but the exuberance of the earlier canvases was still present, and that was not what he wanted. The next ten years were to bring a series of surprising metamorphoses, during which we gradually entered a space of complete disenchantment with the world, a troubled zone where anguish and solitude reigned, all brilliantly enveloped in an uncompromising light that, in an alliance with undeniable tenderness (violence of revelation, tenderness of painting), portrayed the vulnerability of the human being.

By the 1980s, Rustin had found the hard core of his painting. From then on, he would say, the challenge would be to be able to do the same thing, always differently.

In autumn 1982, a major retrospective was organised at the Maison des Arts André Malraux, an exhibition that would establish Rustin as the last artist and create a scandal. It was also the occasion for the publication of a first monograph in which numerous authors put their pens to work in the service of their fascination. It was thanks to this work that a young Belgian dealer discovered Rustin's paintings and decided to buy his entire output. Numerous exhibitions were held throughout France and abroad. In 1991, a second monograph was published, and the following year, two Dutch collectors created the first Rustin Foundation in Antwerp. During this period (mid-1990s), the collector Maurice Verbaet also discovered Rustin's paintings and worked closely on the project to disseminate them. In the years that followed, the artist's work was exhibited all over the world, from England to Italy, via Germany, Brazil and Chile.

In 1996, issue no. 2 of the journal Enfers brought together texts by some of the world's leading writers, giving the work a certain resonance. Pascal Quignard, Marcel Moreau and Jean Clair gathered around Rustin's work to extract its sap.

Rustin, away from the noise of the world, never ceased to deepen his painting: voluptuousness gave way to unease, sometimes to fright. The choices he had made a few years earlier very quickly took the form of an obsession, but above all a discipline. A discipline he imposed on himself until Parkinson's disease caught up with him and prevented him from painting (but not drawing). He died in 2013, on Christmas Eve, leaving behind him a huge body of work from which to extract a complex sap that will no doubt continue to bring its share of censure, rejection and controversy, as well as fascinated admirers. Throughout his life as an artist, Rustin never stopped reinventing his painting, from content to form. He made a journey to the heart of tragedy, injecting into each step a tenderness and a light that enabled him (and his viewers) to face up to that truth in painting that is so difficult to achieve.