Bien sûr le petit bateau (Of course the little boat

In the city of Los Angeles, whose heat, light, and hedonism resemble the ambiance of his native Cote d'Azur, Martial Raysse made Bien sûr le petit bateau [“The small boat, of course”] (1963) using his trademark technique: an image of a woman posing on the beach, photocopied and enlarged to a monumental scale, which he then affixed to a canvas and covered with Day-Glo colours. The tiny red boat referred to in the title, far off in the ocean, sails out of the frame, away from the fluorescent foreground that holds our attention.  This detail humorously underscores the conscious artifice of the image and the directing of the viewer's gaze. The principle of assemblage underlying this piece is typical of the New Realists, with whom Raysse was associated. By transforming the pictorial plane into a sculptural presence, this piece questions both the two-dimensionality and the autonomy of painting, as in other works by this artist.

This painting is part of a large series of female bathers made between 1962 and 1964, for which Raysse appropriated paintings by the old masters in which he applied electric colours and played with their pictorial presence by adding objects to their surface. The female bather, a traditional subject in French painting, is represented as a garish, alienated object of desire. Flowers, which symbolise the ephemeral nature of life in Vanitas paintings, become tangible and dazzling, albeit synthetic. Raysse also looks at the construction of illusions, as well as the stereotypes of the female image in art history and advertising.

The Pinault Collection first showed this work in 2023 at the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes, as part of the exhibition Forever Sixties.