Café Commerce Suisse was painted during one of Camenisch’s most important creative phases, since the canvas combines the lessons learned from Expressionist painting with a Surrealist component that announces the artist’s concerns within the future Gruppe 33 group.
Infused with an original energy generated by the contrast of colours and forms, the picture offers us a dark biting look at the idle distractions of the new bourgeoisie dressed to the nines and drowning their sorrows in a café. A caricatured depiction of the human comedy, the painting adopts the precepts of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and already suggests a certain form of social critique, which the artist was to express again and again in his work.
Infused with an original energy generated by the contrast of colours and forms, the picture offers us a dark biting look at the idle distractions of the new bourgeoisie dressed to the nines and drowning their sorrows in a café. A caricatured depiction of the human comedy, the painting adopts the precepts of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) and already suggests a certain form of social critique, which the artist was to express again and again in his work.