Peter Stämpfli

The Works

Rouge Baiser
1966-2002
92 x 242 cm
Oil on cut canvas mounted on a frame in the same shape

Rouge Baiser represents female lips in a format over 2 meters wide and a deep red color. Stämpfli cut the canvas, mounting it on a frame that precisely followed the shape of the silhouette of the lips.
It is set back a few centimeters from the wall, so it advances into the viewer’s space, creating the sensation that it is floating, or perhaps has been floating when the rest of the body has disappeared. Without reaching three dimensions, the object surpasses the traditional two dimensions of a painting.
It is just lips and a color, the red of the kiss, which in 20th-century iconography has become a symbol of passion, eroticism, and desire. Almost 60 years after this work, the image of red lips may no longer be surprising, but the work still retains its original force.

Rouge Baiser is permanently on display in Room A of the Stämpfli Foundation as part of the “Dictionary of Everyday Objects and Gestures” exhibition that Stämpfli painted between 1963 and 1970. The goal was to abstract them from the banality of daily life and bring them into the artist’s studio, represented through the manual technique characteristic of the great pictorial tradition: oil painting. This was the artistic stance of Stämpfli and other young artists of the era, aimed at reintroducing the object and figuration adapted to the changing social context of those years, contemporary with Pop Art and the new realisms.
The work, painted in 1966, was destroyed in a fire in the artist’s studio in 1990. It is the only one of all those that were lost that the artist ever made again. It was in 2002, at the special request of Daniel Abadie, curator of the exhibition that the Jeu de Paume in Paris dedicated to Peter Stämpfli that year. Abadie convinced the artist of the need to include the work, to which he reserved a privileged place.

Town & Country, no. 2
1972
351 x 215 cm
Oil on canvas on cut-out frame

From 1970 to 1990, Peter Stämpfli abandoned the inventory of objects and gestures of daily life to focus on a single theme, symbol, and modern myth of mechanized society: the tire and its geometry.
Color disappears, replaced by shades of black and gray, and the expansion of the works’ dimensions is very important, with large-scale paintings and sculptures projecting into the viewer’s space.
The painting depicts, in an upright orientation and on a large scale, the upper half of a tire, painted on a canvas cut to its silhouette and placed atop a custom-built frame made for the work.
Its location in Room 1 and the dimensions of the work serve as an indicator, like a large-scale stele, of what the visitor will find in the three rooms dedicated to the antological exhibition of the artistic evolution of the Swiss artist, resident in Paris, named an honorary son of the town by the Sitges town council in 2004 and the founder in 2010 of the foundation that bears his name.

The artist

(Deisswil, Switzerland, 1937)

Peter Stämpfli is extensively covered as an artist, both in the sections of the menu for his permanent exhibition and in those that explain the Foundation that bears his name and his relationship with Sitges.
Here, we will limit ourselves to discussing him in relation to this specific work.
His personal reintroduction of the object and figuration, adapted to the changing social context of those years—contemporary with Pop Art and the New Realisms—took the form of representations of the most banal or impersonal things, of the everyday gesture of having the first coffee of the day, opening the newspaper, a tomato, or, as shown in any of the other works exhibited in room A, as mentioned above. but also others not shown here such as a washing machine, a refrigerator, a pack of cigarettes, a telephone, the hand holding a hat or a glass. Always on a white or yellow background, a neutral, continuous space with flat colors and neutral backgrounds that clearly evoke the style of a commercial advertisement.
In that very year, 1966, in the United States of America, within the abstract minimalist movement, artists such as Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly were also cutting their geometric works into volume in a manner similar to what Stämpfli was doing with the lips of the Rouge Baiser.
Stämpfli focused his gaze on the most attractive aspects of the most modern automobiles of those years. He soon concentrated solely on the tire and, more specifically, on the tread and the geometric profile of this hidden, barely visible, dark, and always dirty but essential part for the operation of a motor vehicle.
Here began a long career focused on the investigation of an abstract geometry contained within the most concrete of industrial objects.