Off Paradise is delighted to present 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 to make a certain number of decisions, just as for any show.”
The proposal was never realized and has remained a text in Rutault’s archive to this day, more than four decades later.
In a nod to that passage of time, Nadin has made the decision to realize the protocol by painting a single canvas 42 times over, plus one.