Jean Rustin 
Introduction
At first an abstract painter, Jean Rustin has been painting since 1971 an incredible series of portraits of his fellow human. Lost in deserted rooms, these figures at times indulge in pathetic sexual behaviors. Rustin convenes in his paintings in an apparently unsophisticated way the internal eye, reflecting characters that enact and contemplate their own disolving terminations.
Jean Rustin : a few landmarks
Born in 1928, he has been displaying his art in 1959. By 1971, the musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris organized a retrospective show of his abstract works. A shock to the artist, who turns towards figuration. Jean Rustin is a well known artist worldwide and his works can be views in major public and private collections. Born in 1993 in Antwerp, Belgium, the Rustin Foundation moved in Paris in 2007.
Curriculum vitae
Personal exhibits
. 1959 -1969 : Galerie La Roue, Paris, France
. 1980-1986 : Galerie Isy Brachot, Paris, France
. 1986-1993 : Galerie Marnix Neerman, Bruges, Belgium
. Since 1993 : Rustin Foundation , Antwerp, Belgium
.1971 : ARC, Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, France, Catalogue
.1982 : Maison des Arts André Malraux, Créteil, Paris, France, Catalogue
.1994 : Städlische Galerie und Ludwig Institut, Schlosz Oberhausen, Germany
MAC, Sâo Paulo, Brazil
Markiezenhof, Bergen op Zoom, the Netherlands, Catalogue
.1996 The Delfino Studio Trust, London
Museu de Arte Contemporaneo da Universidade de Sâo Paulo, Brazil
. 1997 Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de la Universidade de Chile, Santiago, Chili
. 2000 Veranneman Foundation , Bruxels, Belgium, and Frissiras Museum, Athens, Greece
. 2001 Halle Saint-Pierre and Galerie Marie Vitoux, Paris, France
Works in public collections
Algeria : Musée National des Beaux Arts, La Hamma
Germany : Hamburger Kunsthalle
Städtische Galerie et Ludwig Institut, Sc
Schloss Oberhausen
England : British Museum, London
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham
Brazil : Museu de Arte Contemporaneo da Universidade de Sao Paulo
Chili : Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, Santiago
Spain : Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona
USA : Art Museum, Princeton University
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
Smithsonian Institution, Washington
The New Orleans Art Museum, New Orleans
France : Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Paris
Fond Régional d'Art Contemporain de Seine-Saint-Denis
Fond Régional d'Art Contemporain, Rhône-Alpes
Fond Régional d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marne
Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
Monographs
« Rustin », Entretiens avec Michel Troche, textes de Bernard Noël et Marc Le Bot, Editions de l’Equinoxe, Paris, 1984.
Edward Lucie-Smith, « Rustin », London, 1991.
Agnès Meray, « Regards sur l'Œuvre de Jean Rustin », Thèse, Université de Paris I, 1992.
Revue Enfers, « Jean Rustin », avril 1996, textes de Claude Roffat, Pascal Quignard, Agnès Meray, Jean Clair, Françoise Ascal, Edition Pleine Marge, Paris.
Chat
Statements
The negative world
Why is it that these paintings of Rustin necessary make us think of Artaud ?
Ville-Evrard, Rodez, beds with posts of metal, with their straps, grey walls: impossible to demolish these references. The internees, sitting, upright, have their blue or brown blouses, of which some of them get rid of in an access of hopeless exhibitionnism, desire of desire that cannot meet any, that cannot create any.
The poor provocations. Their faces are blured by the excess of expression, by grimaces, by the disorder of their thoughts and of their feelings, by anguish perhaps. They look in front of them, but one could not ensure that they see the world. What would they see anyway ? The cells, the courtyard, the guards. It is enough to have entered an asylum only once to know that, in there, the negative truth of our world is naked.
Against the permanent movement and its daily praise, the immobility. Against the production and its worship, the seeked out or undergone inaction. Against the common language, dumbness or invented languages – “charabiés” according to the word of Artaud.
>From this denial, the societies organise as they can, claiming to look after, generally locking up, eliminating in the worst cases. During the moments supported by faith or by a collective reason, their insane are conviently forgotton. In times of doubt and concern, it is more difficult for them to act as if they did not exist. For about a century, Western civilization has been in this situation. It would be hardly excessive to suggest that it lives with, more or less hidden under surface, the obsession of madness, because this one - and it does not matter by which pathology it is defined – refutes all that the official discours, the devout speeches and official morals promise or expect from each one of us. Prinzhorn, Freud, Binswanger, Foucault, Deleuze.
This obsession lives in art like in all the other "branches of industry" - terminology of the time. The reassuring distinction between the art of the "mad" and that of the artists who would be sane lost any effectiveness since it has been proven that there is more to learn from the first than from the latter. But, for Rustin, it is not about that. He is not on the side of Soutter’s or Wölfi’s “outsider” or asylum art. His control of painting as instrument is complete, so much so that it becomes transparent.
Let’s try to picture : painting is for him like an invisible liquid, such that once plunged in him, the nervous and mental states become visible at once, like an impressed paper plunged in the revelateur. How is this operation possible, how is this visualization achieved, one must be acknowledged unable to explain it sufficiently.
But paintings are there, all of a sudden, immediate, pressing. Pitiless and irrefutable. The negative side of the world reveals itself.
Of how many paintings today can we say so much?
Philippe Dagen
