Footnotes

This work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

Provenance
Galerie Mathias Fels & Cie, Paris
Noël Rovers d'Hondt Collection, Malaga
Thence by descent to the present owner



A masterful composition which combines the representational and the abstract, Peter Klasen's Lieux d'Aisance qui ne sont pas accessibles à tout le monde (literally "Bathrooms that are not accessible to everybody") of 1967 is wonderfully evocative of the decade in which it was created.

An exceptional early work from a period when the artist's rich talents were first becoming widely recognised, this painting encapsulates many of the elements that were to establish Klasen as a key player in the French avant-garde scene of the 1960s. Produced using an airbrush which sprays a fine mist of paint onto the canvas, it features both hard edge and soft focus, the viewer's gaze darting from the crisp, cool reflections on a metal pipe, across an expanse of vivid blue to the soft fleshiness of glossy female lips. Like a trompe l'oeil, its painstakingly painted surface suggests a collage of appropriated images, partial remnants of photographs torn from a book or a magazine and pasted onto the canvas. It presents us with a challenging and yet timeless vision of human and product as one and the same, the eroticised female as commodity in a world beholden to the laws of supply and demand.

From 1962, Peter Klasen became affiliated with the group known as La Nouvelle Figuration, a loose association of artists that also included Valerio Adami, Erró and Hervé Télémaque. Celebrated in a landmark 1964 exhibition entitled Mythologies Quotidiennes ("Everyday Mythologies") at the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, the members of La Nouvelle Figuration revived the tradition of figurative painting, but remained resolutely modern in their approach towards the human form. The influence of Pop Art, increasingly popular in the United States at this time, is evident in the subject matter of the present work, which combines the mechanical and mundane with the enticingly sensual, the female mouth placed in an apparently unlikely juxtaposition with a bathroom sink and an electrical plug. The result, however, is utterly compelling, creating a clash of warm human flesh and cold inanimate substance, a contrast of saturated colour and subtle monochrome, the improbable meeting of the pedestrian and the virtually pornographic. Indeed the critic Gilbert Lascault observed that: "Klasen's works constantly evoke the existence of men and women. They never (or almost never) represent them in their entirety...fragments, shadows, reflections, traces and remains: under all of these forms, the human is captured like a game of absences and presences, which refuse to take a direct approach." (Gilbert Lascault, Klasen: Rétrospective de l'Oeuvre Peint de 1960 à 1987, Aix-en-Provence 1987, pp. 59-60)

The present work's use of frames within a frame, tight windows onto visual fragments placed across the canvas, is particularly distinctive. Obvious comparisons could be made with the American Pop canvases of Andy Warhol or Tom Wesselmann, but there is also something unmistakeably European about this painting, which bears striking similarities to 1960s masterpieces by British artists Gerald Laing and Allen Jones. Typical of Klasen's important body of work, Lieux d'Aisance qui ne sont pas accessibles à tout le monde from 1967 delivers a searing critique of modern mores that is not only aesthetically appealing, but also just as fresh and relevant today as it was when first painted almost fifty years ago.