Claude Rutault’s oeuvre can be situated in the spirit of the Fundamental Painting of the 1970s. These painters focused on the formal and fundamental principles of abstract painting, their only purpose being research into the basic elements of the medium: dimensions, format, form, plane, line, colour, texture, material and method. The painting was stripped of all its illusion and viewed as an essentially flat plane covered with colours arranged in a particular way. Fundamental Painting refers only to itself. Any less is hardly imaginable.
