Collection: Patrick Drut

“Patrick Drut’s quick sketches are less fleeting than they seem. The framing is only seemingly nonchalant. The gesture could reveal a sensitive rendering of landscapes and the bodies inhabiting them, if it were not already itself the imitation of an image originally recorded from viewpoints other than his own. Rather than a personal gaze, he fixes in paint a tiny span of time drawn from inter-personal gazes. To fix in paint is to resist evanescent images. To fix in pictorial layers is to save something of them.”

Patrick Drut is a French painter born in Lille in 1968. Trained in visual arts, art history, and philosophy of art at the University of Lille, he has developed since the 1990s a practice centered on series-based painting, favoring the materiality of gesture and an economy of means. He exhibited at Lasécu (Lille) in “Caf, Valérie Vaubourg et Patrick Drut” in 2005, then in “50 x 50” in 2007, and “Lasécu 15 ans ça se fête” in 2016–2017. More recently, his works were shown in the group exhibition “#ETE25” (Le Lieu A, Lille, July–August 2025) and “La Vie ne Rose” (Salle Courmont, Lille, November 2025)