La Chambre de Balthys IV (Balthys' Bedroom IV)

La Chambre de BALTHYS IV (2001) is a vast and striking triptych painted by Jonathan Meese. The work was conceived as part of a series on Balthus which eventually metastasized into a huge installation of paintings and objects in an imagined apartment in the Falckenberg Collection, Hamburg. ’Balthys’ in fact appears to be a half-invented artist, bringing together aspects of Matisse and Balthus. Meese reflects the central themes and preoccupations of their art in his own irreverent, neo-Expressionist style: the triptych is dominated by a pale, nubile blonde lying languidly across its three panels of brown and yellow interior; a darker female figure echoes her pose below. To the right, a black silhouette of a man sits at a table with a bottle of absinthe, offering the girl a wilted sunflower. His own head is repeated in the left-hand panel, snaking ominously along the arc of a long, black arm. Meese’s dramatic figural distortions and intense, rough brushwork seem to unleash the poised tension of Balthus’ paintings, which presented scenes of cats and girls tinged with dreamlike fantasy. Meese was fascinated by the works of Balthus and his brother Pierre Klossowski, and collected extremely rare books by the two to explore their postmodern painterly, literary and philosophical positions. Alongside such characters as Nietzsche, Wagner, Lolita, the Marquis de Sade and more, they form part of Meese’s obsessive engagement with historical figures who have attracted a cult of personality – a pantheon synthesised through the central character of Jonathan Meese, who takes the ego of the artist to hysterical, all-encompassing new heights in order to transcend history itself.