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.