Peter Klasen

Peter Klasen in the 1960s and 1970s

When, in 1959, after completing his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, the young Peter Klasen left Germany for good to settle in Paris, he already carried with him the firm conviction he had just formed after visiting the 2nd Documenta in Kassel, entirely devoted to informal, tachist, lyrical abstractions, and so on: namely, that “he could never produce that kind of painting...”.

And it was in a city that was itself invaded by these hegemonic abstractions, in Paris where one scarcely yet suspected the existence of American and English Pop Art — a movement that would only truly be revealed at the Sonnabend exhibition and the Paris Biennale, but only in 1963 — and at a time when only “the awareness of a modern, industrial and urban nature” was beginning to assert itself, that, under the influence of the other Realists, that is to say, as Pierre Restany wrote in his 1961 manifesto, Peter Klasen would indeed become one of the very first of a group to introduce into figuration the materiality of the reigning painting, the coldness of a “New Figuration” that would question the images and objects of this new everyday world.

“One of the very first,” I say, if not “the first.” It is enough to look through the catalogues of those crucial years to see it for oneself. If it is true that most of the names now associated with the birth of this “New Figuration” are indeed found in the exhibitions of 1964–66, embracing the new images and the vocabulary of new realities (cf. Mythologies Quotidiennes in 1964, Figuration Narrative in 1965, Salle Verte in 1965, Figurations in 1966...), it remains no less true that in the years 1960–63 most of those artists were still exhibiting only informal abstraction. And apart from the Nouveaux Réalistes, who worked with objects directly — but in a fundamentally different aesthetic process from the painted representation of the same things or objects — there were hardly any artists besides Peter Klasen, in those early 1960s, who represented in painting fragments of social life, confronted with the real manufactured objects of everyday existence.

In this respect, a painting such as Nausée from 1961 is exemplary: it sets up, in a striking spatio-temporal dialogue, media images and actually painted images, real pieces of lipstick embedded in the canvas — but seemingly able to erupt like engorged phalluses — and falsely offered images; a painted photogram of Anna Karina taken from Godard’s A Woman Is a Woman, and a collage of medical radiographs.

Amid these broad areas of color, Klasen’s visual vocabulary is already fully formed, as is the central problem of “passage” that will remain one of the key motifs in this singular body of work, in its “hinges” of meaning: inside/outside, opening/closing, Life/Death...

Other equally important paintings from 1961–70 will mark this period in the exhibition, where the fragmentation of the social/industrial body — especially the female body — is confronted with a personal fantasy of the fragmentation of manufactured objects with sexual connotations, a period in which the painter’s palette (he paints only with the airbrush through pre-cut masks) gradually narrows to shades of gray, while his subjects, between 1968 and 1972, engage more directly with the duality of woman/object, objects that are also painted or real, whether sanitary, electrical, hospital-related, and so on...

From 1973 onward, the human body completely disappears from Klasen’s works behind doors, grilles, shutters, tarpaulins... in trucks, wagons, prisons..., in short, behind all those places that physically, psychologically, and metaphorically enclose, confine, isolate, and oppress..., and this framing now constitutes the entire frontality of the paintings.

In this miniature retrospective, the selection of works from this period will judiciously show the evolution of this Klasen world; a carceral universe at first completely sterilized in shades of gray (particularly the immense Wagon SNCF from 1973), then composed of an increasingly marked signage with more diversified colors — a universe that would make this painter famous until the Maeght exhibition in 1980, aptly titled Espace clos.

Since then, everyone knows the later evolution of this artist, his attempts to escape the exclusive frontality of the canvas around the 1980s (with images of corridors, visits, traces of bodies, etc. — “keys”), then the increasingly evident return of Man, but in absence, through his traces only (the title of the Maeght exhibition in 1982); at the end of a technological and urban strangeness. Traces, smudges, marks, graffiti that intensify up to Gestes et at FIAC in 1983, where his last works would explode, revealing a regained freedom to capture, at the tip of the gesture, the ephemeral traces of a life that inevitably passes...

But everyone also knows how these 1960s are currently rather forgotten by the many institutions that favor the strict present of art (we are only beginning to “rediscover” the 1950s); when will the 1960s be likewise reconsidered, through a series of exhibitions like those of Erto, Rancillac, and now Klasen?

Indeed, the Roudillon brothers are right: when, at a given moment, the impetuous flow of art dilutes into the countless channels dug by trends and lobbies, and gets bogged down in dark, nauseating marshes, it is better then to go back up to its clear sources...

And the sources of European painting, contaminated by the real, its representations and its phantasms, are to be found precisely in those years; especially in the work of Peter Klasen!...

FRANCIS PARENT
Paris, March 1986