The roots of his aesthetic lie in his indefectible passion for cinema. The Paris-based German artist assiduously frequented the French Cinémathèque. His attraction for German Expressionism, American film noir of the 1940s and 1950s, or the Nouvelle Vague masterpieces is visible throughout his whole oeuvre. Erotically charged, his universe is also influenced by Surrealism and the glossy and polished aesthetic of advertisement.

Constantly awash with unrest, the artist is early obsessed by societies' evolution towards frenetic consumption and insidious violence. As an idiosyncratic and implicit form of comment, Klasen used impersonal yet striking iconic signs, symbols, codes, photos and specific ranges of objects onto canvas. His cold, haunted and enigmatic images are driven by a strong sense of fascination that tends towards fetishism.

This large-scale painting is divided into three parts. On the right, it features a black and white photographic-style image of a man's gaze with a gun crosshairs painted in red upon his unique visible eye. On the left, the coloured close-up on a young woman's looking eye, framed into a cut-out square on a red flat background. The center part opens on an unidentifiable shady dead-end doorway corridor. With a dominant vivid primary red and black palette, including ominous words in neon tubes and evocative elements as a shower faucet­, the painting notably suggests the intricate universe of thrillers filled with ambiguities, fantasies, repressed sexual impulses and bloody crimes.



KS