In 1982, Bastow finally decided to settle in France, first in Paris, and then in Provence. Throughout his many peregrinations throughout Europe, he built strong links that lead to cooperation with artists and authors of all backgrounds. He illustrated the manuscript of the Belgium writer Hugo Klaus, and cosigned La Femme en Majesté with the anthropologist François Héritier. In the preface for Pastels 1986-1991, a drawings anthology of female nudes, Roland Topor wrote “he relentlessly paints women to give them what they don’t have: his desire.”
The feminine body in a naked conquest is at the center and essence of Bastow’s oeuvre. Women in multiple positions, reclining, sitting, languorous, legs opened, erotic, peaceful, or lost in their most intimate dreams; they inhabit an erotic universe. The technique used, oil pastel, evokes the sensation of velvety skin, and the luminous tenderness of a moment in suspension. His carved lino-etchings, by contrast, depict the crude and devouring pleasures of the flesh, which are expressed in erotically charged scenes.
In 2001, Bastow, who currently resides in Provence, acquired the Chapelle Saint-Alexis, nestled in the narrow streets of Malaucène (Vaucluse). The chapel is now abandoned and its decorations are long gone. Bastow projects to restore and decorate it. It is a true space of exploration, a space of infinite possibility, but consequently a space of architectural constraint. It has become his “kindergarten”, allowing him to initiate a monumental project, the “Ephemeral Frescoes,” which unfolds the seven ages of women. On separate transparencies, he sketches a shoulder, a hand, a leg a face, etc. Each drawing has a life of its own and can be applied to any of the existing figures. They can be preserved, covered up, or fragmented, in an eternal beginning. Pinned to the walls of his studio, pastels, charcoal sketches, and pencil drawings wait for their turn to be center stage.
A strong believer in the idea of the inherently non-permanent quality of the human condition, Bastow lets his works ripen and mature. Then, after an indefinite time, he approaches his paintings again, nourishes them, and transforms them. Here and there he cuts out a face or a torso and attaches it to another drawing. Recently he has applied gold leaves on his frescoes-drawings, similar to the Byzantines that adorned the renaissance bodies with a sacred aura. The abandoned chapel has become the stage of the cycle of life, where the artist who becomes the master of ceremony and spectator all at once, continues to relentlessly explore the mysteries of the female body and soul.