For the celebration, in March, of the artists eightieth birthday and sixty years of creation, the Fondation Rustin proposes, simultaneously with the second edition of the Contemporary Drawing Fair, an exhibition of drawings by Jean Rustin, mirrors of the painted oeuvre since the beginning of his career. 
Jean Rustin's figurative art hasn't ceased to transform since the beginning of the 1970s. A man, a women first appeared strangely in an undefined space, until the day when the painter traced a horizon line, represented a table, a bed, a light-bulb. At this time, the woman and man were cut up and the presence, just as threatening of a knife or a clock gave rhythm to what was prophetically announced.
This anonymous man and woman, were to take shape and their bodies become a clock, a knife, the sword of Damocles of time passing and inexorably leading man to his end. The oeuvre of Jean Rustin was already a vanity, a reflection on time and the artifices of the world. Drawing has played an essential role in the composition and invention of these characters who have become, in a way, his "Cézanne's apples", the pretext of all his creation, subject to all liberties, represented with an exceptional virtuosity, both on canvas and paper.

When Jean Rustin abandoned abstract painting, he chose to show what we no longer wish to see, the reality of a common human condition, far from all the artifices  that life in society implies. He has "de-socialized", presented humanity stripped bare, face to face with itself in an instant of truth, and denouncing, perhaps, an growing incapacity to communicate. Sexuality has imposed itself as a symbolic act that crystallizes the problem of communication. For this reason, the sexual act, in Jean Rustin's painting, is an arrested time, where the characters seem to hold still to observe those looking at them, that is to say us.

Jean Rustin's works do not leave indifferent The painter inevitably pushes us to question ourselves, our existence, our relationship with ourselves and others, and thus the world. In front of a Jean Rustin's painting, we vacilate between shadow and essential light, between good, evil, beauty and ugliness, between the desire to flee or the acceptation of becoming a part of it. We are undeniably concerned.