Painted in 1968, the present work relates to a series of works: Impasse I (formerly in the collection of Jean Leymarie); Impasse II (Private collection, Paris), Impasse III (Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels) and Labyrinthe au torse rouge (Private collection, Reims). The abstracted, truncated torso had appeared as early as 1928 in Šíma's oeuvre.

The paintings of the 1960's, Šíma's mature years, are recognised today as his most fully formed and intellectually rigorous works. They often deal with metaphysical ideas, concepts which reference the real world without actually attempting to copy or reproduce it. This approach has been described as a sort of 'materialist mysticism', in which Šíma's works evoke what is in effect a virtual reality, an otherworldly state in which man is present, but only just.

The paintings of his final years, of which L’Impasse is a classic example, were undoubtedly the artist's most experimental. Inspired by the rediscovery of supposedly lost pre-war works, and their inclusion in exhibitions in Paris and Prague in 1964, Šíma's later output represents the fusion of youthful enthusiasm with the skills of an artist in his prime. Although they still contain elements of the material world, these elements were now so subtle as to be almost indistinct. L’Impasse displays the typical softness of this period, and a lightness of touch in its painterly execution. Šíma creates a quiet, calm and sensuous image, which at the same time also captures and expresses a powerful and potentially terrifying sense of unease. The sinuous curves of the central red female torso are beautiful but it is essentially a head - and a limb-less figure, resembling lips, a tongue or the lips of the vulva all at once. This sensual and erotic centre of the composition is the gatekeeper to the void behind it. The title of the painting ‘L’Impasse’ – Dead end further underlines the ambiguity inherent in the composition.

The members of Le Grand Jeu were welcoming notions of the Void. Le Grand Jeu criticised European rational civilisation and instead drew inspiration from Indian philosophy, occultism and primitivism, the unconscious mind and experimental metaphysics. The members of the group tried to overcome real-world borders, using various means from poetry, to drug and alcohol use, sleep deprivation and meditation to penetrate their subconscious in order to create works of art. Šíma closely collaborated with the poets Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and René Daumal, with whom he had co-founded the group. Gilbert-Lecomte in particular is considered one of the most eminent poets of the Surrealist period. His often outrageous poems were visionary and sardonic, and sought to express ‘the impersonal instant of eternity in emptiness, the glimpse of eternity in the void’.

L’Impasse could be a considered a visual representation of what Gilbert-Lecomte sought to express in poems such as II and V:

II

A home to ghosts and to the children of night
A place of absence stillness gloom
The whole of space and what it holds
In a field all white a black hole
Like the cave of the sky
The whole body of woman is a vacuum to be filled

V

As Antaeus revives by touching earth
To revive empty space by touching skins
In your bosom I lie in order to perform the rite
Of homecoming to where I came from when not yet born
The animal sign of the archaic ecstasy

In your bosom I lay the offering
Of balm and venom mixed
Blind as I am
In the caves of being that are the antechambers of annihilation

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1891, Šíma moved to Paris in 1921, and it was in the French capital that his career was to take flight. His meeting with Mondrian in 1925 was crucial to his own artistic evolution, and Šíma was particularly fascinated by Mondrian's refusal to label his paintings as 'abstract', a term which he felt failed to recognise the importance of the natural world in their creation. By 1926 Šíma was a French citizen, and the following year he became one of the founding members of Le Grand Jeu. Šíma befriended some of the best-known Surrealists, including Hans Arp and Max Ernst, and organised Andre Breton's visit to Prague in 1935. Although often compared to the Surrealists, Šíma and the other members of Le Grand Jeu saw themselves as more rational than Arp or Ernst, rejecting automatism in favour of a more controlled intellectualism.